


your sins like the morning mist

by ofelia_found



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Self-Harm, Swearing, fantasised murder, literally no idea how tagging works, murder? kinda?, rook swears a lot, will turn into something else but no idea what
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:20:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 27,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28439760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofelia_found/pseuds/ofelia_found
Summary: After the end, the preacher is left with the lamb. He will save her from herself, raise her to grace, wash her clean. Whether she wants it or not.Redemption is a bloody thing.
Relationships: Female Deputy | Judge/Joseph Seed
Comments: 13
Kudos: 55





	1. according to the riches of his Grace, Ephesians 1:7

He’s been thinking about killing her again. 

Not with any real intent, more as a meditative exercise. A diversion, if you will, like the chess games in his head when he’d needed a distraction from the sharp stink of the streets and the loneliness that woke him drowning and spluttering in the bite of morning. 

At these times, he’d dreamed himself off to a patch of remembered library, illustrations in abandoned books of kings and queens and rooks and pawns, worked through a game he’d never even played till he no longer felt the cold, and his limbs no longer shook. 

This is how he treats the possibility of killing her. A little comfort, a lozenge tucked against his cheek. In small doses such medication can have no ill-effects, and it’s a surprisingly effective distraction from the grief building within him. The loss of his children, his family, his brothers, hits him when he wakes, leaves him reeling, permeates even into his prayers. It rocks him, makes him stagger and catch hold of the wall to steady himself against the tide. 

Only the thought of killing her alleviates the pain. 

How to do it? 

He’s never much liked guns, and it would be unwise to use them down here, anyway. He doesn’t want to hit a wire, a vent, a pipe by mistake, and turn this ark into a tomb. Too impersonal, anyway. He wants to use his hands. 

If they were outside, under the blessed sky, he could drag her to a river, screaming, throw her into the water and hold her thrashing limbs. She’s strong, but he’s stronger, and anyway, the weeks of injury and deprivation have stripped her down to a shadow, matted and scared and held aloft by stubbornness alone. It wouldn’t take much, if he could access the sky, to take her by the hair and neck and watch the water wash away her filth and breath and, finally, corpse, carried by the current. He can almost feel the lightness, the relief this would bring. A fitting end, one John would approve of. You have to love them, he’d told his brother, but he was wrong about her. She had hellfire under her skin, and if he hadn’t been so weak, so drunk on his own mercy, so prideful and gluttonous at the thought of saving her, him, them, all, then he might have saved them all. His children, his faithful, his family, John and Jacob who had given so much only to perish at the hands of a pawn mad on blood. 

But there is no river here, no bath, even, and a bucket of water would prevent him seeing her face. That’s what he needs, he decides, during these indulgences. He needs to look into her eyes. 

A knife, then, stick her like a pig, gash open the slender throat and feel the blood, oily and hot spurt across his hands. A hunter’s slaughter. This death he dedicates to Jacob. It’s how he would do it, Joseph thinks. An ignominious, dismissive death. Putting down a dog. 

Faith now… she’d want something different. Softer. On the rare occasions when he’s not panicking, not swept away by loss, just lying on his mattress and staring at the prone form of the deputy chained and unmoving on the bed, when these indulgences are less from self-preservation and more a kind of mental reward, on those occasions he feels kinder. Feels as though Faith might slip her little hand into his and whisper in that sweet, pure voice that first called him to her, Father, she need not suffer. You need not bear that weight, as well. Pills then, or a swift injection of pure Bliss in her sleep, let her eyes bat half-shut and drowsiness sink her into oblivion, till her jaw unclenched and she finally lost the wrath staining her eyes. She would look peaceful, innocent. Almost a child again.

In these visions he brushes his hands through her hair, arranges it around her head, gives her the dignity of folded hands and half a prayer. He feels merciful, full of mercy, drunk on it. Dear Lord, return this child to your heart. She did not understand. 

He does not derive so much satisfaction from these particular reveries. 

Then there are the other ones, the thoughts that feel more like trances; thick, and heavy.

She hasn’t moved for days, not since the first day, when he’d finished speaking. 

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Perhaps fear. Perhaps comfort. Perhaps gratitude. Afterall, he’d taken her from the wreckage, plucked her from a burning world and opened his arms, prepared to forgive her, wash her of her sins, press his forehead to hers and grant her absolution and lead her into Eden. Yes, there was a body at his feet, but she would understand – the man couldn’t have been allowed to live. He was low and heavy with the world, full of its stink despite his retreat from it, he never could have made it to the promised land. Not like her. 

Still, he had braced himself for her mourning, however misplaced, before he could take her face between his hands and explain to her the truth, the rightness, the safety she could feel, here, now, his family, his child. God had granted them one another. No human should have been able to survive what she had, yet here she was, alive despite it all, despite herself, saved from the fires of the end of the world, and that meant something. She must rejoice. She must prepare herself for a cleansing of her own. She must prepare for the new world. 

He wasn’t expecting the noise that came from her slacked mouth. Not a scream, not a whimper. A croak, more than anything. A crack, as if of something broken, her eyes wide in a picture of despair almost comical in its extremity. Then the moaning, and the day was lost to her struggling and shredding her skin, screaming her throat raw wordless and blind and crazed. She didn’t notice his soothing words, not even when they turned to shouts, payed no mind to his attempts to reason, to comfort.

He couldn’t barely even see her face, the light was so dim, and she’d become nothing but a shape, an animal, moaning and frothing at the mouth. He could scarcely believe she was a woman. Scarcely think her human. She beat her head against the bedpost, the wall, till blood matted her hair

If he hadn’t still been reeling, his innards mangled, his hands empty and vision blurred with adrenaline and grieving, he might have felt something like rage at her ingratitude.  
As it was, he watched without moving till he saw the spill of blood. Then his body moved on autopilot, some remembered system rising from his subconscious, the sequence he’d repeated so many times at the psychiatric hospital – take hold of her, secure the other hand (it had been a mistake to chain one only, he saw that now), make sure she couldn’t choke, wouldn’t swallow her tongue. 

She was weakened and half conscious and small, but it took effort to pin her down, his whole body on top of hers as he tried to stop her struggling. It was at this moment, looking down at her bleeding, bloated face that he would revisit, later, in his more sinful indulgences. These imaginings were not done for his brothers, his Faith, his flock. These thoughts he has sparingly, and for himself alone. He draws on the memory – her body pinned beneath his, the heat of her, the stink, her hands tied, her hair wild and filthy. She stops her screaming, panting, and before she can start again his hands are around her throat. Her eyes widen momentarily, in fear, in understanding, but it’s too late, she’s beneath him, weak and warm his hands pale against her neck as he digs his fingers in, feels his muscles ache from the effort, begins to squeeze. She wheezes, chokes, fights for breath, her eyes begging for mercy, but he doesn’t stop, even as her body buckles beneath him, tears leak from her opened eyes, he’s feeling her shudder, looking into those pupils, dark and blasted wide as the last defiant spark, with agonizing slowness, dims. 

Then there is only silence, and the bruises his fingers have left around her neck. 

This sequence, like all the other thoughts of execution, is an indulgence. It borders on sinful. God has given her to me, he scolds himself, tugging himself from thoughts of the drowning, the blood, the bruised and broken neck. Lord, you have given me a duty. A purpose. I understand that, that a shepherd must have a flock however small, that you wanted one more soul saved – is that is why you spared her, drew me towards her at the end, made her like feathers in my arms? One more sinner saved, that through her redemption all remaining souls might be redeemed.  
But there were other sinners. Ones not drenched in blood.  
Lord I do not question, but I wish…  
She ripped through my family and tore them to shreds. She sucked their blood from her lips. It stained her teeth.  
Why must it be her? Who has wronged me more than any other?  
So that is why, he answers himself, again and again. She was not saved for herself. Not for mankind, even. She was saved for you, that you might prove yourself to him, one last time. 

To prove you can take this trembling, gnawing sinner in your hands and lead her to the light. 

He turns the rosary till his flesh is raw.

Put away your own grief, your own pride. Prove that you can perform His work, despite your pain. Despite yourself.  
She is your redemption, too. Lead her to his Grace, and you can lead anyone, lead them all. 

This is how each fantasy ends – tearing himself from thoughts of justice, righteous fury, cooling his blood with duty. Then he’ll check on her – still kept peaceful by clockwork injections of sedative Bliss, drifting in and out of consciousness – and drip some water between her lips. He hasn’t fed her yet – she should be awake for that, and he doesn’t think she’s ready. But he’s wiped small trickles of urine from her legs and changed the sheets the two times her bladder has given out during the haze. It’s no different from what he’d done for patients, once upon a time, but she’ll need a proper shower soon.  
Maybe in a day or two. She’ll be weaker, then, more pliable, less likely to try and rip his throat out. In a day or two he’ll wake her from the soporific haze. In a day or two, the work will begin. 

Till then he will allow himself some small flashes of her death, even if he must follow them with fasting, slices of atonement in his flesh, desperate prayers to forgive this gluttony, this wrath. He is weak and lost, and cannot fight the thoughts, even if he swears never to enact them, promises his God that both he and the lamb will emerge once more into His Light. 

He cannot end her. God wills it. 

But that is not the only reason. 

He can still remember those hollow, aching years, the ones barely strung together, lost in the wilderness where he walked the earth, barefoot and alone. Alone. That was a fate worse than anything – worse than belt buckled gouges, worse than the senseless, thumping pain of a breaking, worse than gnawing and exhaustion or even the searing radiation above. His fantasised revenge will sit, sterile and sharp, and never fruit.  
Like it or not, it is not God alone that keeps the deputy alive.  
He needs her, too.  
After all these years, he is still afraid.


	2. a hungry man dreams he is eating and awakes with his hunger, Isaiah 29:8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rook dreams

In her dreams she is with Ada-Mae again. 

She knows that she is dreaming. Even in sleep she can’t quite escape the grief hooked through her innards, and this girl before her is so very much alive that even in this dream, even wearing her child’s body again, she wants to keen from relief, from despair, from love. Instead she smiles, and drinks in the sight of her sister. 

These dreams always seem to take place in the summer, in the golden hour, when the burning heat of the day has settled into the earth, now rising to soak through their skin, buttery and sweet. The mountains in the distance, the trees and yellow grass blur into smudges of blue and green and yellow, the air a haze, and the only thing in sharp relief is her. Ada. 

She’s still wearing her hair in two braids, which means momma still brushes it out and plaits it every morning, so Daddy must still be alive, so Ada can’t be more than ten. It is Before. Before they lost Daddy, then momma, then finally each other. 

Guilt, for a moment, twists. 

Nothing much happens in these dreams. Sometimes Ada is weaving bindweed into crowns, intense and peaceful at once as she concentrates. Sometimes she is telling stories, fingers articulating the air, stories she’s read in books and tucked away to be bought out and offered like sherbet to her hungry little sister. She feeds her Hamlet, and Ophelia drenched in flowers, trickster Anansi, Persephone underneath the dirt, Sedna and her severed fingers. Ada-Mae knew more stories, but these are the only ones which her younger sister can remember hearing. 

This is how she knows it’s a dream. Ada-Mae knew more than that. 

Best dreams are the times they do nothing, only lie, arms folded around each other, looking at the burnished sky. 

Then, with a panic, something will shift, and the light and the breathing and the comfort will tilt and slip away as much as she reaches, tries to scream out no, begs her mind the dream begs god to bring it back, just for a moment, bring her sister back to her.

When she wakes it’s with sobs wracking her body, dry as sandpaper, burning through her. She barely sees the bunker, the dim light, the stale smell of the filtered air. It blurs into her shut eyes, stains like dried blood, she’s living in a scab, and all the loss and the pain, the dead faces and dead friends, the scorched ground above, nothing can compare to the loss of her sister, raw after five years and still oozing pain. 

But there’s almost something comforting about it. With this loss, one she pushed away for so long just so she could keep moving, one surfacing now that she has, for the first time in all these years, stopped, with this pain she is… protected. This loss can make all those other losses seem inconsequential, those friend’s deaths feel like flesh wounds, the thoughts of an obliterated world barely a scratch. If she could survive this, this impossible, shaking loss, then she can survive anything. 

Ada-Mae still looking out for her. 

She doesn’t have to live long in the scabbed world, with her dry mouth, the stink of her rasping skin. Before long, in the blind thump of pain, there are strong fingers tugging the skin in the crook of her arm, and a sharp prick. She closes her eyes when this happens. She doesn’t want to see him. The wallowing thoughts of Dutch’s corpse, murdered in his sanctuary, dying without the family he’d sacrificed to save, threaten to break. She wants to keep them underneath, the skin of water taught across them, the open ocean of her losses bearable provided the bloated bodies and mutilated limbs stay beneath the surface. 

Only Ada is allowed to surface.

Sometimes Rook is almost tempted to lean into the fingers, beckon them to her mouth, kiss the murderous hands and whisper out a thanks because whatever he’s injecting, doing to her, it’s bringing her sister back. She hopes, sitting in the sunshine with Ada, that this isn’t a dream but a glimpse of after-death, and that one day the preacher’s fingers will misjudge the dose, let her sink into the light. 

He’s not kind enough for that.


	3. his mercies begin afresh each morning. Lamentations 3:23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> t/w - canon typical violence, bordering on sexual assault (but not really)

It has been five days since the end of the world, or there abouts, according to the time the digital clock blinks out with apathetic, garish glow. He would have broken it, corrupt technology as it is, but It will be important to mark the days. There will be 2555 in total (as a set of numbers how neat they are, the seven a reflection of the number of the holy, 777, three fives mirroring the father son and spirit, two which can be added to any five and bring it to seven, it is so right, so fitting, praise the calculation and the reach of the Lord). 

He does not intend to emerge a sunrise sooner, a sunset late. 

He wakes on this day, 2551 more to go, with a strange lightness in his heart, the weight momentarily gone. Yes, there is still an absence and abscess leaking in his heart, but the crush of it has eased. The clock informs him he has slept four hours – the longest stretch yet, and a dreamless one. He lies upon the mattress, feeling a faint smile grow across his face. He is lightheaded, and almost breathless. 

How beautiful it will be, in time, to step into the New World, the cleansed and redeeming air, leading out his little lamb. 

But it will take time. The parable of the sheep and goats rises into his mind – the righteous, docile sheep saved while the goats, and their stubborn greed, their disobedience, perish. A transmutation of a sort would need to take place, to tug the lamb away from the damned flesh, the corruption of the world. Feeling reinvigorated, and free of a physical aching he wasn’t aware of till it left him, Joseph rises to his knees and gives thanks. 

He has been sleeping on the floor, alternating between the thin mattress he stole from a bunk and the hard ground itself when he felt his flesh needing further purification. Sleeping so low makes it easier to shift from sleep to prayer. 

Oh Lord you have stripped this world of its filth with your Blinding, and I shall continue your work, go forth and make this world in your image, endeavour to let go what I have lost that I may be filled only with your greatness…

A low, slow groan breaks him away. Irritated, he looks to the chained figure on the bed, and stands, preparing himself to fulfil whatever new tasks await – must she be washed again, watered, wiped? It keeps him humble, but he would be lying to say it is an easy task, to be so close to the woman who stole so much, to clean and care for her in his role of shepherd tending a sick member of the flock.

She smells like she is rotting. 

Oh, he’s tried to keep her clean, but hasn’t yet trusted her, or himself, with uncuffing her and dragging her to the showers. He’d given her a quick, callous scrub the first day, decontaminating the unconscious woman of any dust particles that might have lingered on her, stripping her and scouring her flesh and dressing her again, her head lolling in unconsciousness, all while the man Dutch’s body rapidly cooled in the next room. 

But since then, the sickness of what he’s lost building like bile, the thoughts of his hands around her neck all the more present, all the more tempting, he’s tried to minimise contact with the deputy. 

He doesn’t quite trust himself. 

So she lies there, half a corpse, stinking. And groaning. 

Something has changed. 

He stands, and a wave of blackness hits.  
It’s not a vision, far from it, only a quick headrush, a prickling burst of red dots and darkness. Still, it makes him stagger. 

When he can see again, he is aware that he is shaking, cold sweat dripping down his back. 

Rising too fast. Sleeping too little. And when had he last eaten? No reason to feel so shaken, yet there is something else, something unnerving, threatening – 

The deputy has opened her eyes. 

She no longer seems stupefied by the bliss, nor crazed, either. But her eyes are unreadable, which shakes him, slightly. He’s used to reading gazes like children’s books. But all he can tell from the deputy’s half lidded gaze is that she’s tired. He’s not even certain she’s seeing him, as her customary rage is nowhere in those dark pools. 

He wonders if he should say something. 

Before he can make up his mind her eyes are shut and she’s turned her head away with another sound, this time a dog’s sigh, weary and guttural. 

He stands stupefied for a moment. 

What has prompted this? She cannot be sober, the Bliss couldn’t have left her system yet, but she isn’t drugged, either. And where has the brutality, the wilderness of before ebbed to? 

Could breaking her be so easy? 

A sign. It is a sign. It is time to move beyond this, time to begin the teaching.  
His heart staccatos into rapid beats.  
A purpose. A meaning. A duty.  
He can find himself with this. 

Swallowing, Joseph walks slowly towards the crumpled woman, unhooking the cuff keys from around his neck. Should he say something? Words come so easily to him, flowing like water from his tongue, thrumming through his blood like sparks, but he finds himself uncertain. None of his words have worked in the past, on her, only made her silent eyes burn more vicious in her Pride, her Wrath. 

“My child,” he croaks as soothingly as he can, but lets the comfort trail off. Perhaps there will be time for words later. He must be patient, let her come to him, trust that the Lord will not leave him wanting for long. 

He thinks she will flinch away when he touches her, or, more likely, lift her head and spit blood and phlegm into his face. She’s not the most dignified of fighters – he’s taken in hours of captured footage during her heretic’s crusade and become very familiar with her tactics. Rotting meat used to lure nearby predators into bases to rip through his flock while she picks through them with a rifle, thrown rocks, pipes, once even a fish she’d got her hands on, and when all else fails she’ll go down spitting and clawing and biting. She’s a fine shot, but she in a corner she falls back on instinct, forgetting weapons and ripping into his people with her nails. Covered in river mud for camouflage, emerging from the water like an eel, filthy and mute and burning. 

He braces himself. His hands might move to freeing her with divine prompting, but faith doesn’t mean Joseph Seed is stupid. She won’t let him do anything easily. But his hands are almost shaking with excitement as he slots the key into the cuffs. 

This is it. This is the beginning, finally.

You will see, deputy. Though now you keep your eyes closed, your battered face tilted away, and your hand falls as slackly as a corpse (he catches it as it drops from the cuffs, gently placing it on the pillow beside her head) in time you will see me as I am. See what I have given you.

He swallows. Waits. She doesn’t appear to be tensing for a fight. If anything, she looks almost peaceful. Almost sacred. The welts across her face are ugly, true, and the black sutures he’d used above her brow give her a rag-dolled, stitched up look, but there is still something… she looks like a holy icon, he thinks; those Catholic Marys, eyes closed in divine exultation, lips parted with revelation - or the Magdalen, cleansed and weeping at Jesus’ feet. 

The thought pleases him, though the following image, of the deputy kneeling, her face turned towards him, her full lips gasping open with a prayer – that imagine troubles, for reasons he doesn’t have time to unpick. 

Reasons he’d rather not consider. 

In a hurry, now, to move past the new thought that has made him tremble he leans over to undo her other hand. 

He only lets his guard down for a second. 

It’s enough. 

The soft click of the opening cuff.  
Her dark eyes, huge and burning like coals.  
Her knee, delivering a particularly vicious blow to his crotch. 

Winded, stumbling (he should have eaten, why hasn’t he eaten? Prayed and exercised and mortified the flesh and stripped himself of energy and left himself so fucking vulnerable) Joseph jerks away from the woman, who is not a woman now. 

She’s the beast again. 

With a guttural noise she throws herself off the bed. 

A flash of panic - in the other room - the only weapon he’s not locked away – the small gun he’d left off cleaning when the urge to sleep overwhelmed him, and isn’t that just like him? To let sloth guide him, to make such a stupid, stupid mistake, and pride, too, pride to think himself ready to confront her, add that to the wrath, those bloody fantasies, and after all this he will be undone by his weakness, his failure – 

The thoughts rip through his head in an instant. 

But the deputy has not walked in days. Two steps off the bed and her legs give in. She falls with a cry. 

He doesn’t give her time to get up. He crawls to her, throws himself on top to hold her shuddering body still.

Her fighting feels like nothing.  
He realises he’s clenching his jaw. 

He could take her head right now. There’s no way she will listen, not now, not ever – see how she reacts to kindness? She’s incapable of hearing. Her ears are stuffed, her mouth is bloody, she has the eyes of a feral thing.

He could take that head of hers and bring it down upon the floor. 

He can almost hear the crack. Her eyes would stare back at him, shaken, disorientated – no time to collect your thoughts, here is the hard ground again, again, again, till her skull is a wreckage and her blood soaks his fingers, and is this what you wanted, deputy? Is this what you wanted from me? Is this how you meant it to end?

“Stop,” he hisses through gritted teeth. “Deputy.” 

The deputy doesn’t stop. He’s got her arms pinned above her head, but he can’t stop her thrashing, kicking the useless legs underneath him. 

This isn’t a good idea. This is a waste of time, a waste of energy, pointless and futile and frustrating. 

Be quick, Joseph.

More brutal than is necessary, he wrenches her hands together to he can take both wrists in one hand (no time to slow, he’s stronger but this is tricky) and, in one fluid motion, takes the small vial of bliss from his pocket, uncorking it with his teeth, going for the mouth – 

She spits it out with a splutter, the thick strands of dehydrated saliva coating her cheek - 

Quick thoughts, always quick, and isn’t that something he’s always had? A brain like lightening, cutting and instinctive – 

She will fight again. She cannot fight again. She must be quietened – 

He knocks back the remaining half of bliss himself. 

She stops her trashing, and he has only a brief glance of suspicious, panicked eyes before – 

It makes sense, as a strategy. She needs to ingest the bliss. He cannot inject it, force her mouth open – he needs at least one hand to hold her steady. But with the bliss in his mouth, he can drop the vial, grip her with both palms, and without hesitation, without giving her time to understand, push his mouth against hers and force her lips apart. 

He parts her mouth harshly, his teeth grinding against hers, tongue helping keep her open. She gasps at the touch of his lips, and then chokes on the bliss she’s just inhaled. He sees the fragile, instinctive swallow in her slender throat. 

Good. 

He relents his weight on her a little, kneeling over her so she can turn to cough away the choking. It doesn’t matter if she moves now. That was a strong dose. In a minute she’ll be out cold. 

She seems to realise this, rolling back to look up at him with an expression of mute, already slackening rage.

He doesn’t try to hide his satisfaction. 

“Deputy,” he tsks, “there is no need for this. You must understand, I am only trying to look after you.”

She doesn’t seem impressed. But then she smiles, bright and clear as morning light. 

No time for him to think a victory is at hand. Perhaps in panic, perhaps in protest, perhaps merely to get a reaction from him, the deputy has had time for one last little rebellion before the bliss takes her. 

Meeting his eyes, she pisses herself.

He wrenches back from her with disgust, and she lets out a sharp bark of laughter before lolling into unconsciousness.


	4. my children are walking in the truth 3 John 1:4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rook remembers

This time they go to grandmas. 

Rook jolts awake into the dream, the stop of the car rousing her from her nap with a little snort. Bleary eyed, she looks over to Ada-Mae, who immediately bursts out laughing.

“Baby!” (they all call her baby, her parents, her grandmas, her sister. At school they call her Rook. It’s as though they’re all separately, rightly, concluded that her given name doesn’t suit her – it’s too formal, classical, _neat_ ) “Momma, Baby’s been dribbling in her sleep!”

“Shut up Ada!” Rook scrubs at her cheek, batting away Ada’s giggling hands as she reaches over to help, too.

Momma turns over her shoulder, and for a moment –

-for a moment Rook is wrenched out of the memory. For a moment she forces herself to take in the sight of her mother as she is now – the soft, cream-coloured arms, the loose auburn curls glittering in a halo around her head, the eyes, Jesus fuck the eyes that will be lost but now are clear and adoring, washing over her daughters with bubbling love - 

Momma giggles at the sight of them, both half fighting each other as they try to clear away the drool.

“Stop it Ada I got this!”

“No, you don’t! Momma she don’t, look, she’s smearing it everywhere – I told you momma we can’t let her have orange soda, look at her mouth!”

“I _like_ orange-”

“It’s not that bad,” Momma spits on a tissue and leans over into the backseat scrubbing Rook’s protesting skin, “hold still Baby.”

“You got it all over yourself,” Ada laughs, scrubbing Rooks protesting cheek with her sleeve, “It’s orange, momma, look at her –“

“Stappit. Gerrof. Leamelone,” but her ineffective battings do nothing to deter the valiant efforts of her mother and sister. Momma has leaned so far into the back she’s lying down, and her feet are kicking behind her – she has to use one hand to prop herself up – and Ada has started copying their mother, spitting onto her sleeve and tryna wipe the orange from Rook’s face, and even though she’s struggling, pressed up against the door to escape their determined washing, even though her hair is going in her mouth, her eyes, she can’t help giggling at it can she? Because what a frothy moment, bursting like soda bubbles, the sunlight streaming through the dust in the car so it’s as though the air is full of tiny specks of diamond –

Daddy opens the door Rook is leaning on from the outside, and the girls spill out of the car in a puddle of giggles, onto the dusty driveway in front of grandma’s house. Rook’s laughing now, properly laughing, the kind of soundless wheeze that rocks her stomach and is impossible to stop, trying to crawl away from the spit bath.

“Michal stop her!”

“Daddy she must be _c l e a n e d_!”

Then she’s being lifted up, held in front of daddy for inspection, her legs dangling. He isn’t a tall man, she’s not far off the ground, but he is very strong.

The sunlight on his skin, chestnut brown and lined from laughter, glowing.

“And you, young lady? What do you have to say for yourself?” His mock seriousness makes her giggle more, a laugher that only increases when he brings her closer to inspect her orange mouth and dribble-stained cheeks.

“I didn’t do nothin!” she wheezes out.

“None-the-less,” he peers at her closely, “it is my professional opinion that there is something wrong with you. Something deeply, disturbing wrong. As a man of medicine, I swore an oath to treat the sick,” he shakes his head regretfully, “and so I’m afraid I have no choice but to cure you of this illness. To the tap!”

“Noooo!” She shrieks, but he’s bundled her up and half run with her to the house, and over and down he goes to scoop her gently below the tap outside the kitchen window, and all their hands are on her, tickling her and making her laugh and splashing her face with sun-warmed water as they clean her –

_It shifts, changes, no this isn’t right, the water is cold, it isn’t meant to be cold, is it? The hands on her are rough, scrubbing at her viciously, where the sunlight gone? Where’s her family? A moan catches in her throat – then fingers sticking into her mouth, rubbing something sweet and bitter across her gums, she wants to bite them but her mouth won’t move, not properly and –_

She surfaces into the sunlight again.

“You water-boarding my grand-kid, Michal?”

The family looks up from their kneeling on the ground, all of them covered in dust and half-soaked, to see Grandma Ada leaning from the kitchen window, a spoon in her hand and a smile on her wrinkled face.

“It’s a treatment,” Daddy replies, with as much dignity as a kneeling man can have when his wife and daughters have erupted into giggles, clutching him for support in a cluster of wheezing. Rook is sitting in his lap, burying his face in his should, and she can feel Ada-Mae’s arms wrapped around his neck, his mother behind him, hiding her face on his back so the top of her head brushes Rooks –

It feels so warm. So safe.

“If I’d know this is what you’d use that medical degree for, I’d have apprenticed you to a pig-farmer,” Grandma Ada snorts. “Now bring me my grandbabies. Let me look at them.”

Daddy stands, shepherding his smiling, calmed daughters over to the window. Grandma Ada’s face breaks into a grin.

“Well look at that. I think you’ve grown about two inches, Ada-Mae. And look at that hair!”

Ada-Mae is taller, Rook realises with a jolt. Taller than she’s been in the other dreams, and her hair is different – out of the two plaits, it’s now a symphony of delicate braids, shining around her shoulders.

It was the first time Momma has taken her to a real hairdresser, Rook remembers, driving for three hours to get to a black hairdresser so Ada-Mae could have her hair done properly. Her eleventh birthday present.

The braids reach almost to her waist.

No. No no no no no, Rook thinks, the future rising in her gut. It tastes like bile, like blood.

The others don’t notice (how can they? They are dreams, memories, they don’t know what is to come), only look at Ada-Mae, smiling, as they had done. Those proud, adoring faces. Rook wonders if they all thought the same thing in that moment – that the girl before them was miraculous.

She was that, after all. A miracle. Rook had heard the story many times. Ada-Mae, born too early in a bath during a blizzard so strong the ambulances couldn’t get through, no one could get through, to the neat white house with the porch and the roses and the bindweed overgrowing it, the little house heaped on all sides with snow.

Far enough from the town to give them peace, let Daddy watch the birds and Momma tend the flowers.

Far enough away that when it came to the early, keening birth of their first child, there has been no one there to help. No one except themselves.

Rook has always loved this story.

The power out, candles lighting up the bathroom. Her mother’s face pale and straining, blood marking her skin from where Daddy reached up to brush her cheeks, his own hands a scarlet mess. The long, bronzed hours with the candle flames and pain, and then, finally, as the first sunlight streaked through the window, the blizzard ending, the snow outside making a new world –

Little Ada Mae.

They had been frightened when she hasn’t screamed. But wasn’t that just like Ada? She greeted her panicking new parents with calm burbles instead of cries, mouthing her little raspberry lips against momma’s skin, lifted her little kitten face in a way that seemed to say – it’s alright. I’m ok. Don’t cry, momma.

I’m sorry I was early. I wanted to meet you.

I’m here now.

Rook, overdue and bloated red, had naturally made her entrance to the world four years later with, presumably, the decision that if she absolutely _had_ to be here, if she was going to be _forced_ into existence, then she was damn well gonna make everyone’s lives hell.

She’d screamed so much Momma had been afraid her throat would tear.

Hadn’t stopped screaming, in fact, till Momma had handed her to Ada-Mae. At which point she’d stopped with a baffled little hiccup, paused, and taken her first sleep in her sister’s skinny arms.

Miracle Ada-Mae, just turned eleven, standing in the sunlight as they all look at her, completely unaware of what they are thinking – beautiful, gentle, wise child, you are a blessing. As usual, she doesn’t notice their adoring glances, only smiles back at Grandma Ada, her namesake, and tilts her head so her braids fall to the side.

“You like it?”

“Course I do, child. Now get yourself and that little sister of your dried and come and help me in the kitchen. There’s a cake for you to ice.”

“She gotta ice her own cake?” Rook quips, and Ada-Mae hits her lightly on the head.

“Every year you say that.”

“And every year we ice it.”

“I _like_ icing it.”

They grumble, affectionately, round to the back door where there are always clean towels on the washer, and Rook turns, as she had done, to see her father holding momma in his arms, combing his fingers through her red hair, his eyes bursting with love. Then, behind them, Grandma Judith’s truck pulling up.

Daddy and momma raise their faces to look at her as she hops down, heavy boots landing in the mud, and they call out a greeting.

Grandma Judith looks serious as she answers back.

For a moment it’s as though a cloud has crossed the sun, and Rook stills, rocked again because something has changed, something is turning, something will never be the same again.

Her father looks up, sees her watching, and gestures his mother in her direction. Following his eyes Judith sees her granddaughter and immediately schools her expression into something lighter, giving her a little wave.

Ada, behind her -

“Baby come get dry! I wanna lick the bowl before Grandma cleans it!”

She can’t remember so much, so sharply now. A vague recollection: Ada scrubbing at her and tugging her into the kitchen. Grandma pushing her hair back from her face, tsking at the state of it – _Ada-Mae this baby sister of yours needs to let her hair be brushed once in a while –_ wrapping an apron round her that will, they know, do _nothing_ to prevent the messes Rook is so adept at making. The warm, savoury smells of grandma’s cooking, Ada-Mae’s eyes lighting up, delighted, as she decorates her birthday cake, and outside –

Outside the hushed voices Rook pricks her ears to hear. Snatches of the grown-up talk.

_Tara, darlin’, I’m saying that if he can find me, if he can find the shelter, that not that far off finding you. You need the police._

_Judith I can’t. You know I can’t._

  * _Find you_



  * _My brother_



  * _Your babies_



“Hey! Stop that sneakin’ girl. Michal, Tara, Judy, you take this conversation where nosy little things can’t listen in, ya hear?”

Grandma brushing her hair back from her face again. Gentler this time.

“Don’t you worry about that, sweetie. It’s nothing. Grown up talk.”

Rook looks up. Ada-Mae has stopped her decorating.

She looks nervous, too.

A while later, the sun has moved, Ada is picking at icing with her finger.

Rook looks carefully at the table, and tried to keep her voice light as she says -

“I didn’t know we had an uncle.”

The warning look Ada shot her when she said that.

The pause.

“You don’t, child. Now help me set the table.”

Had momma looked tired that night, her face pinched? Had Daddy kept glancing around at them all, nervously, his hands twisting. In her memory, Grandma Judith’s eyes burnt black with swallowed rage, and Grandma Ada’s hands, when they took hers for Grace, shook.

Or are these imagined things, added at a later date, memory distorted to reflect the truth that would come later.

They eat by candlelight, and it’s fitting, because it makes them look like ghosts.

Fitting.

The next day, momma will take her and Ada-Mae home, so they aren’t late for school. Daddy will stay a couple of days, to help out in the garden, with the motel-turned-women’s shelter Grandma Judith runs. Then he will take his mothers for a drive.

Late night as they drive back, twisting road through the mountains – a car of kids, high and drunk and full of rage at the road the night sky the emptiness of it all –

When the police, the next morning pick the three bodies from the wrecked car, they are strangely perfect (so rook and Ada-Mae are told). Unblemished by the crash save a few scrapes and cuts, Judith and Ada holding each other’s hands in the back seat, crumbled together, and Daddy with his face turned up and open. As though he’d been looking at the stars. 


	5. leviticus 6:27 wash that which was stained in a holy place

Her hair scrapes across the floor as he drags her to the bathroom, and her head spills limply to the side when he changes direction. If he was feeling kinder, he would have taken her by the shoulders. 

He isn’t feeling kind. 

With a bitter taste in his mouth, he thinks back to when he’d first seen her, standing in his church. 

Perhaps the casual viewer would have assumed he was lost to the sermon, to the pulse of words ripping from his throat, overwhelmed and sacred. Often times he was, and the words left his veins like lightening, flesh sliced open: vivisection, revelation. 

But when that wasn’t the case…

Well. The Lord overlooks some deceptions, if it is for the greater good. 

This time, the fervour was a show, the ecstasy a mask. He wasn’t grasping at the congregation, fixing them in place with his eyes, trying to pierce through their skin, bring them with him to a quickening. 

This time he was scanning the room not to meet his people’s upturned eyes, but to watch the door. 

The men arrived, as Nancy had said they would, the Whitehorse and the Marshall and the… the third one. The new one. Not important. Recent transfer from California, small town cop, young. Small between the two men. 

He hadn’t even seen her face, not properly, not at first, his eyes blurring with adrenaline, his blood thumping with the knowledge that – yes it is now it is the time, the spark, they’ve come and set off the spark that will rip through the gunpowder and bring their edifice crumbling it is the time it is the time time time to throw off the restraints and do what they can, snatch up as many souls as they can serve findsuppliestrainsoldiersmakeworkerstheywillpreparetheywillpreparethemselvesforeden – 

But he had noticed her eyes when she cuffed him. Huge and very dark.  
Unflinching.   
You didn’t often see eyes like that.  
Didn’t often see people like her. 

Conscious and struggling in the helicopter, when she should have been unconscious, or at least slumped over in defeat. Those eyes burning.

He’d known she was meant for something by the time she was standing before him, dripping river-water and wheezing in his brother’s hands. He’d known she was important. 

But he’d been wrong. He had been so, so wrong. She wasn’t important. She was threat. The way he’d found himself fascinated by the snarls of her mouth, the videos of her taking down men with her bare hands, the compulsion to open his mouth and talk – he had thought she was meant for something. Promised. 

He should have killed her in the helicopter. Wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed. She had taken everything.

And here he was, dragging her filthy, stinking body to the bathroom, wishing he could cave in her skull. 

Not able to hold her upright, (he needs to eat something, he shouldn’t let himself get this weak) he sits her below the shower head. 

It’s a utilitarian thing, this bathroom. A little more human than the decontamination set-up by the entrance to the bunker, but only barely. The walls and floor are the same white tiles, and there’s no distinction between the shower and the rest of the room, so all water funnels into a depressing drain at the centre. 

He longs for the bunkers he and his brothers built. Not luxurious by any means, but at least they felt a little less like prison (her head lolls to the side, and her lips part loosely). And they would have known, in those refuges, that the others were close, doing their work, abiding by His Plan (He strips her of the hospital gown briskly, and turns on the shower. She groans, lightly). They wouldn’t have been alone. They would have had each other, or, at least, the promise of each other. And they would have had their people. Their chosen. Their faithful. (he scrubs her skin with soap, kneeling in the spray and letting it soak through his borrowed clothes) And they would have had the others. The ones they’d saved. Because through it all, the suspicious looks, the raised fists, the hatred and rage and cruelty the project faced, they had wanted to save people. Anyone. As many as was possible. (her eyes flutter for a moment then still. He moves her head to one side and cleans behind her ears). She hadn’t just taken his Project from him. She hadn’t just robbed him of his brothers, his Faith - the loss still searing, still making him buckle from it. She hadn’t been content to destroy whatever she’d touched, purge his faithful, burn his work to ashes. 

She murdered all of them. The followers and forced alike. She’d damned them. They had burnt, choked on poison dust, lain in their own filth and agony and been eaten from the inside because of her.

Pride. That drives you to do horrors, drunk on the notion of your own good. 

He realises he’s been scrubbing her the skin on the inside of her thigh too harshly. It is red. 

She’s clean enough now. He stands, turns off the shower, looks down at the naked woman slumped against the wall. He swallows: the tender inside of her leg is marred by tiny burst vessels. His stomach lurches and he rests his forehead against the cool tiles of the wall, looking at her from the corner of his eyes. 

She shows no sign of waking up – she’s so limp, rag dolled on the floor, that he’d be worried she was dead if not for the jagged breathes rasping from her. 

Leave her there, something inside him hisses. Let her sit on the hard floor, wake with even more pain in her bones. It’s what she deserves. 

She looks strangely vulnerable. He tends to have a removed way of viewing nudity – the body is the body, after all, vessel for the spirit, necessary and to be cherished, but there’s nothing particularly different about a naked one versus a clothed. 

And yet. 

He can see the unshaved hair beneath her armpits, the thin fuzz across her legs, the dark tangle between her legs. It feels… wrong to see her like this. It’s too animal. Too human. 

He towels her dry and dresses her again. She’s coming round a little, now, conscious enough that when he tugs her upright and rests her against the wall she doesn’t topple, only slumps against him (her forehead on his shoulder, face over his heart, the intimacy makes him shudder). It makes her easier to dress. Now that he’d decided to wake her up (it would be wrong, somehow, to send her back into her haze. And he didn’t save her like this only to see her turn into a vacant thing, angelic, empty eyed, her insides scooped out with a spoon) she should wear real clothes. He’d left her sitting in the shower for a few seconds, fetching the dress he’s set aside – a loose, shapeless thing that he can tug over her head without too much contact. 

Her skin looks like it’s been shredded. Time and time again, mulched and torn and bandaged back together with broad, slapdash strokes, sloppy stitches that have left jagged, uneven scars. Who did that, he wonders? One of her friends? No. The hand that performed these loose, frenetic rites was uncaring, almost cruel. 

The ragdoll, he thinks, has been stitching herself back together. How many ribs broken? That ankle has never set right – he had noted how she limped, stood lopsided, when she stood outside his church not so many days ago. 

Deep scratches on her face. The hair breaking from her braid. Mouth set in a firm, determined line. 

He holds her waist, folds her docile (for once) arm across his shoulders, half carries and half walks her into the living room. He fights to keep the smell of her away. Clean, now, but he can still detect the lingering scent beneath – her open pores and skin flakes, sweat glands oozing, intimate parts he did not clean, could not bring himself to touch, sighing out their particular odour. 

Bittersweet, and heavy. 

He folds her compliant little body into the chair, smooths cream over her mangled wrists, ties down her arms and legs (no risks, this time). 

He waits.


	6. Proverbs 18:20-21 and those who love it will eat its fruits.

It feels like surfacing. Kicking frantically towards the skin of water, breath burning in her lungs. 

Stars and a vision of her father’s face, momma’s mouth falling slack as she sleeps, red hairs sucked between her teeth, Ada stroking her head as she weeps and the unsettling, breathless light of the grey world. Just before the dawn. The sky streaked with claw marks, rips of red…

Of green. 

She pulls herself up from Ada’s lap, moves to the door. With each step, she is reminded that her bones of full of lead. She drags the door open. 

The porch outside is choked with bindweed. Too much. It is strangling along the bannister, up the railings, making a heavy canopy above her. It covers every inch. 

It doesn’t smell right. Too thick, too sweet. And underneath it, the coppery heat of blood. 

She pads over to one of the flowers, cups it in her palm. She’s wrong. It isn’t bindweed, though it looks similar. Familiar. 

The flowers rustle under her bare feet. 

The garden doesn’t look right either. It’s too big – much bigger than she remembers. The forest is in the very distance, almost at the edge of sight, and between here and there is…

Nothing. Softness. A faint, pale green haze. 

Her tight chest, the salt on her cheeks, they feel less real. Her skin feels less real. She is porous, there are holes in her opening up, and the sky is hidden from her, and there is something in the air, dust, or is it stars? 

A glut of butterflies. 

Shakily, she hitches herself over the railings, drops the small distance to the grass. 

There’s something off about the way she falls. She’s too light, or the earth’s pull is wrong, altered. 

You can’t come out too fast. 

Where does that thought come from? A voice, older, heavy, male? Not Poppa, not now, it’s too late, it’s after..

Come out of what? Wasn’t this place dead? The woman it latched on to, the mind it spawned from, she floated away, waterlogged…

Rook draws a shaky breath. 

Fuck. 

She can see the world cresting on the horizon, the sharp slither of dawn conjoined with consciousness. She doesn’t want to go. Stay, stay here, with Ada and Momma, however grief sick, whatever horrors are yet to come, the future rank and crumbling in between her fingers, but don’t take her away…

The white-hot dawn inches away at the pale mist. 

Everyone is dead. Everyone. The world is a mash of bodies and bones, the soil stuffed with toxic dust, the sky suffocated. Winds tear the air apart. The stars are all gone. 

She can’t go back. She can’t. 

Nick, Kim, Grace, Sharky, Jess, Addie, Hurk, fucking Peaches, Cheeseburger, Boomer…

The baby. Carmina. The baby. 

Earl. Joey. Staci. 

Her goddaughter. The baby. 

And she’d annihilated the only places they would have been safe…

She clutches her knees, dry-heaves onto the grass, fights for breath, fights back the sobs which are more moans, dense and animal. 

Ada. Ada, too. But Ada long ago. 

The sky tilts, mockingly, into blinding white…

Someone is bandaging her wrist. 

She tries to pull away, but her body isn’t listening to her brain. It is still asleep. She can only watch. Calloused, deft fingers smoothing cream over gnawed skin. Soft, deliberate movements. Too intimate, too wrong. Here is where her veins meet, pulsing and keening underneath the man’s touch, here is a stinging flap of skin being smoothed over, the fingers too close to the inside, to the beneath, intruding almost within her, and here she is being tugged up and bandaged, all these movements gentle. And worse for that. 

A low, violated moan in her dead throat. 

The movement stops. 

She doesn’t want to look – has never wanted to look. There is something abject about his eyes. Like open sores, things that should not be, glass in the mouth. They have the colour of the sky – which is to say, no colour. The illusion of blue, and bleak, freezing emptiness beneath. She remembers reading somewhere that wolves try to avoid meeting one another’s eyes – it’s a challenge, and invitation to attack. That potent moment where gaze meets gaze, pupil’s contract, and she is faced with the knowledge that everything about him, everything in her, wants her to sink down. To look away. Whimper, and move closer, and obey. Open up her eyes only if allowed, so he can pour in what he wants, pierce through her, tug her out eyeball first, fraying nerves between his fingers, his teeth. 

Forget his words. He bought half the country under control with a look again. 

But. 

Fuck him.  
Fuck you, Seed. 

She jerks her wrist, snapping his fingers away (can’t move further, he’s secured her to the chair, these knots bite) and looks up. 

His eyes, burning, strip her to instinct. She snarls, teeth bared, come here, come closer fucker and I will rip apart your throat. 

If her behaviour surprises him, he doesn’t show it. Is there a slight tightening in his jaw, narrowing of those eyes, contraction of the pupils? His eyes look like the eyes of a snake. 

Get the fuck away.  
Get your hands away.  
Do not touch me. Don’t touch me!

What comes out is vicious, guttural, hardly human. She can feel the pulse behind her eyes, the stale air in her nostrils. 

His gaze makes her throat contract. 

“You’re awake.”

No shit. 

A brightness, suddenly, skinning her eyes (a torch?). She hisses away. 

“Look at me.”

Do not obey, do not obey, do not – 

Fingers press, the calloses against her lids, he peels apart her eyes and shines the torch at them. They ache. 

Whatever he sees there, in her panting pupils, he grunts with satisfaction and lets her go, gasping. 

She’s wearing clothes. Not the clothes she arrived in, the tattered shirt and hard-worn trousers. Not the scratchy, thin thing she half remembers against her skin, in the bed. This is a dress – loose, dropped waist, long. More a smock really. 

Shit. 

A stone of horror in her stomach. 

She’s not wearing underwear. Her thighs sting..

Calm. Be calm. 

Her pulse is too loud. Her legs ache. She’s going to be sick. 

You don’t know. You don’t know what happened.  
But he would have seen you. You, now dressed in different clothes, he had you naked, dressed unconscious limbs, moved you like a doll, positioned you just so, and who knows where his fingers strayed? Inside you, creeping up, throughinside againagainagain…

(“Shhhh. Hush, babygirl. Breathe.”)

(Ada’s fingers brush against the top of her head. She can smell the flowers…)

Grit your teeth. Bite back the tears. Don’t let him see. Don’t let him see. 

She lifts her head. The preacher has seated himself, quite calmly, opposite her, the table between them. He has steepled his fingers, calmly, and he’s watching her. She feels his eyes unpick her seams. 

If her legs were free she could lunge forward, kick him. As it is, all she can do it glare. 

Body aching, skin tight with stitches, cunt bare and legs shaking. She waits for him. 

He wants her to speak. She can feel it prickling inside her skin, the desire heavy between them. But she won’t. He might have eyes like the abyss, but she’s been silent before. Silent for years, words aborting in her mouth, throat swelling shut with stubbornness. A good refuge, a neat trick, one making half a reappearance recently, silent in the face of murdered Peggies, grateful civilians, Seeds taunting on the airwaves. Jaw sewn shut with steel. 

She makes herself meet him, eye for eye (cheek for cheek, tooth for tooth, you can’t do shit to me, everything’s been done already). 

Underneath the blasted earth, the lamb sits with the preacher, and waits for him to speak.


	7. Chapter 6 (continued)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Should have waited to post previous chapter, because apparently I wasn't done with it. 
> 
> tw: allusions to implied sexual abuse. Swearing.

She doesn’t take her eyes away from his. She is determined not too. She fights to stop her head from slipping, sagging down, pushes back the chorus of the rising dead, focuses on her breath, and on the man. 

It’s painful to see him without those glasses. Yellow, garish, the kind of shitty choice you’d expect from a would-be cult leader in the 70s, not a man in the 21st century. She supposes that made sense, considering his age – 45? 47? She can’t remember. Older. 

But without the hideous things his face is exposed. Meeting the full tilt of his eyes makes her shudder, teeth vibrate together. Anything between her and the burning of his eyes would be a blessing. 

There are shadows pooling at the corners of her vision. She’s been staring at him too long, long enough that the rest of the world has become inconsequential, unreal. The man pulses. He has been soaked in radium. Don’tlookawaydon’tlookawaydon’tyoudare – 

How long has she been down here? How long since the world burnt up, since the crash and glut of screaming, since she’d seen Dutch’s body crumpled on the ground? 

(she’s seen so many bodies now but every time it’s someone she knows, it hurts. Dutch, Eli - Eli had left her gasping, and by the time she’d faced Jacob the pain had hardened into something cold and terrible and beyond her, like when she’d faced her uncle in the woods, in the dark, and the blood smeared across her face and neck like a scarlet hood-   
It’s gone. Now everyone is dead.)

Her body is wracked and she feels lightheaded. 

Think, Rook, think. 

Why has he kept her alive? She catches half-memories between her fingers, pulls them from the water. 

Family. You took them from me.   
I should kill you.  
All I have left.   
You’re my family.   
The light.   
Father. My child.   
Through the gate the gate the god-damn gate. 

So there was that.   
Yeesh. 

The bruises on his face haven’t healed much. Less than she’d expect. He’s made no move to cream and bandage his own injuries as he’s done her wrists. His eyes are sunk in dark, bruised shadows. 

How has he kept her asleep?

Ada’s fingers comb out the tangles of her hair. She rests her chin on the top of Rook’s head.   
She isn’t here. She isn’t real.   
Babygirl I’m gone, you know it, but you can sense me and that world you’ve left, the one still hooked onto you with fishin’ string, you been there before, haven’t you?   
No. No, the bliss was gone – at least the grotesque half-world of it was, washed away in the river.   
Didn’t that doctor say to you it never leaves? Bliss stays in the blood and maybe a bit o’you stays in the bliss. It takes up a home in the snail of your back brain, the little shell where the conditioning is lodged, makes a new world from all your memories. You’ve been breathing in so much of it, there are track marks on your arms, and you’ve even tasted it – 

What? 

You don’t remember? 

The heat and stick, the dark shadows, the red, the womb of the room, the preacher bent over her, his fingers frantic, his eyes abominated, muttering under his breath – 

Wrenching herself away, legs thick and numb and beyond her, the brain not properly linked to her aching flesh – 

The man over her, pressing down on her, his teeth on her lips, his tongue in her mouth – 

The heavy, bloody sweetness of the Bliss. 

She’s going to be sick. She can’t breathe. Corpse-like for days. Her legs aching, flesh bare, he’s dressed her, washed her, crooked his tongue in her mouth, his spit lines the inside of her throat – 

She can’t breathe. 

Babygirl breathe. 

It’s too much. It’s too much. Again again again, her insides are scrambled inside the sacking of her skin, she can’t stop the low, sickening sound building in her – 

His hands smack against the table. Her head jerks up. 

For a moment they stare at one another. 

He’s angry. She can feel it like a pulse between them, building in the cracks of his face, the shaking of his hands against the wood of the table, the clenched jaw and underneath the skin of his face the gritted teeth. 

A pulse between them. Atavistic, instinct -   
She wants to whine. She wants to show him her throat.   
No. 

He rises abruptly, stalks around behind her. She stiffens but doesn’t feel him near – though forces herself to stay alert, ears pricked, until there is the sound of - water? – and she is fairly certain he’s in the kitchenette. Finally she allows herself to sag. 

Sleep. She wants to sleep. She wants to cry.

Ada hums a little tune, comes to rest her head on Rook’s lap. She can see the flowers twining in her sister’s locs, and they’re alive. Bindweed, white and burnt and indigo, rustling as it grows, black-eyed-susan’s opening up their pitch-dark mouths, poppies bleeding down her neck…

She need to think. She needs to be smart. 

Wrists. Slightly mangled – she can feel the peels of skin beneath the bandages. She was cuffed, wasn’t she? The familiar aches of badly healed injuries still with her, but there’s a tightness on her face – stitches? He’s sewn her up. 

She’s been washed. And he seems to be wearing new clothes – a dark, ill-fitting shirt. The hideous belt-buckle gone.

So, their old clothes are gone. Good. He’s not so lost to religious fervour that he’s numb to the threat posed by radiated dust. That suggests he’s cleaned up after them, too. And the body. 

Where will he have put the body? 

She looks up, breathes, counts the carnival lights still strung across the ceiling. They are an anachronism. They are perverse. 

The sound of a…kettle? It’s wrong, somehow. Too domestic. Homely, almost. 

She remembers waking up here the first time, sinking against the sofa, watching the fishes in their illuminated tank as she tried to pull herself together. Thinking that despite the rough walls and darkness, Dutch had tried to make this place… 

His burnt up family. 

For some unsettling, inexplicable reason, Seed has kept the fish tank. The residents swim on, unperturbed by the desolated world above them, the woman staring at them, the cult-leader mass-killer man of god or prophecy or just plain luck and old-school lunacy busying himself in the kitchen. The fish don’t care. They swim the little circles they’ve always swum. 

Fuck them.

A delicate prick on the back of her head, and silence from the kitchen. He’s watching her. She makes herself straighten her spine, clench her jaw together to stop her teeth from chattering. He won’t see her weak. 

She hears his footsteps, behind her.   
Brace yourself.   
Will he hit her, pour the kettle over her skin, will she feel his fingers twisting round her throat and his breath in her ear, Georgia coming through in his anger as he hisses – my family?  
You took them from me. 

And then she could reply, laugh, say, yeah. I watched Faith collapse in a cloud of spores, giving up what you had made her, saw John’s baby-blue eyes full of fear and the desperate thought of you, Jacob offer himself like a sacrifice, profane. I took what you offered me. You put them in my path and I, I separated wheat from chaff, I mowed them down, would have liked to compost their bodies and belief in the mad hope that something better might grow. Except your poison was too deep. 

I took them from you, but you’re the one who killed them. Asshole. 

He puts a bowl in front of her. It’s hot – steam rising from it. The liquid is a strange, pale yellow. It smells…

It’s soup. 

She looks up, and the preacher speaks. 

“You’re going to eat.”

She can’t stop the shallow, snorted laugh. He looks so serious, so intense, with his cup-o-soup between them. Chicken, probably. Chicken, of all things. 

He frowns.

“I wouldn’t laugh, Deputy.” His voice is low, rough. She can almost hear it scratching the inside of his throat. She supposes he hasn’t been speaking much. “Not now.”

It’s the kind of vague warning that would have made her laugh all the harder if it had come from another mouth. If it had been his elder brother’s threat, she’s have laughed on principle, with a fuck-you you-don’t-own-me with a sneer. If John had said it, it would have been too calculated, too theatrical, too damn cliché for her to stop herself sniggering. 

But from Joseph the words are measured. Even through his neglected mouth, they carry that veil of benevolence she’d grown accustomed to. The skin of kindness he dressed himself in each day. Only sometimes did it split, and then – 

Then there was the other. The abyss. It’s in his eyes, and it hangs behind his words. 

She’s stopped laughing. 

Satisfied, he leans forward and lifts the soupspoon to her lips. 

He can’t mean…

“Eat.”

He tore out a man’s eyes. 

She opens her mouth. 

Fuck that’s good.


	8. Revelation 21:8 that burns with fire and sulphur

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw: self harm, violent thoughts

He’s preparing himself for her to sneer, spill his little offering, spit the burning soup in his face. He’s bracing himself for it.

So when her reaction is not only to swallow compliantly, but to _savour_ the mouthful, eyes closed in pleasure, he’s more than a little unsettled. This only increases when she opens not just her eyes but her _mouth._ Lips parted unconsciously – it must be unconscious, because despite her hunger she’s still watching him with suspicion bordering on loathing. She couldn’t knowingly let him see this – this desperation.

Perhaps the bliss still hasn’t left her.

He’d been worried, at first, that she’d been in the bliss too long. But in the torchlight he’d seen nothing concerning. He is well familiar with the sticky cataracts that proceed the bleaching of over-exposure, and she is far from bloated angel eyes. She is brimming over with herself, resolutely _here_ , chest falling, pulse throbbing in her throat, eyes watching him. He can almost hear the synapses firing in her skull.

He wonders if she understands what control it takes to feed her, clean her, bind away the wreckage of her skin. Perhaps if she did, she wouldn’t be so eager to take the food from his hands.

His hand trembles as he raises the second spoonful to her lips. She takes it quickly, whimpering for more.

When she was asleep, she was an object. When she was awake, feral and unhinged, she was an issue, to be dealt with. Now, placated, she is a sickening reminder of herself.

She swallows the third spoon, so quickly she half chokes. Immediately, she opens her mouth for more.

“You must be slow, my child.”

She snaps her eyes to him, and it’s as though she’s just remembered who he is, and where they are. He’d be lying to say he doesn’t relish the brief flicker of fear he sees. Not just relish – drink in that sudden _terror. He can almost smell it in the air. He half-wants to open his mouth, to taste it._

_Temptation._

Her eyes are too easy to read. Everything is there – defiance, fear, pain. Fury. _Pride._ And everything she feels burns.

_How easy it would be,_ he thinks, as he idly raises another spoonful to her now closed mouth, _to make that fear deepen. Take that spark and blow upon it, softly, watch it burn through her dark irises, swallow the pupils. There’s nothing to stop me._

There’s everything.

His head feels as though it might split in two.

Words rise above the tangled whispers, clear as daybreak. _If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head._

He forces himself to smile.

“You may eat.”

If anything, her lips draw tighter together. He frowns. He is too tired for this. He is too weak.

“Eat.”

Slowly, unwillingly, she parts her lips for him, and he gingerly tilts in the spoon.

“I have thought about killing you,” he says. It’s difficult to speak about it mildly; this

hallowed thought nurtured and nourished while she slept. He wonders if she can guess how much it meant to him. _Sustained_ him. It feels like a sacrifice to share it.

He swallows. He won’t look at her – he will focus on the spoon, the soup, her mouth (he thinks she’s bitten it. Maybe somewhere between the bed and the shower, the bathroom and the table, her teeth sank in. There’s a little tear, leaking).

_I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat._

_It is the bread which the LORD hath given you._

“But as you know, I have decided against it. You have a purpose,” he can’t keep the distaste from the words, “as do I. The Lord has placed us here for a reason. In His wisdom, he has seen fit for you to survive. He guided my hands, that I should bring you here. He gave me strength to carry you, guided my steps, hid my face,” for the man, Dutch, had been too terrified to recognise him till the girl was out of his arms, and by that moment it was too late and the man was dead, “and saw us here. Together. As much as you deserve to die – and mark me, deputy, you do – you shall not. He has granted you His Mercy. As He once granted me.” He hadn’t given much thought to what he would say, but he is pleased to feel the words birthing easily from head and tongue, flying from him even if his throat feels oddly grated, sandpapered, grazed. “And so,” he feels the strength to look at her, now, and even smile, “you are to live.”

She takes him in for a moment, then she spits in his face.

He remembers John, how he used to hold him, stroke his hair while he sobbed, grown men reverting back to the childhood they’d never be free of. How John, in those moments, would struggle to breathe, gasp out – _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Joseph forgive me, forgive me._

He would press their foreheads together, fighting back the tears from his own eyes, and whisper _John, you must atone. You must repent, and you must work. It is not so simple as forgiveness, brother. I have seen the strands of your future and with every indulgence you snip some away, leaving only horrors._

_I don’t mean to… Joseph it’s not my fault… I can’t stop myself…_

_Control, brother. You must learn control._

He knew what drove John. He had felt it himself, the white-hot scream of it, phosphorus in the bones, the rot. Like a possession. _A tool._

That is what Jacob had taught him. That violence could be a tool. That to break a man’s fingers, dig nails into sockets, squeeze out gasping air, feel the rush of pain and blood and appalling, trembling _rightness, righteousness –_ all that could serve a purpose.

Joseph had gone further than Jacob, though. Jacob still allowed himself some satisfaction from it. But Joseph had done away with that, until each bloody act was a task like any other, necessary and cold. No indulgence. He had forced himself to look upon the sinners, the cruel and vicious and perverse, and feel, not vindication at their punishment, but pity. A removed, abstract pity, granted. But there.

No indulgence John. No enjoyment, Jacob. Each act must cut us more deeply than it does them. Else we are no better.

Jacob, when he said these things, always had the same look in his eye – as though he was fighting the urge to roll his eyes. And John? John full of shame, desperate to please, vowing to do better – vows they both knew would be rendered ash next time John had a perceived enemy pinned to the ground before him, a pretty girl tied to his chair.

But Joseph had fought the poison. When he felt it building, he’d taken measures to contain it, slicing his flesh as he stood in church, the congregation hooked onto his every move as he confessed his sins and _cut._ Some would be overcome, start wailing, clutching at their throats, not daring to touch him but begging him to stop. Others would, in ecstasy, leap up and join him, pounding their bodies or gashing open their skin, their voices a chorus, confessions grafting together to rise, monstrous, teeming, a throb of _for I am unworthy Lord oh Lord oh Lord I am unworthy to lead to do your bidding my flesh is weak and my spirit is impure I have fallen to wrath to pride to greed (and the other would join ENVY GLUTTONY SLOTH LUST) cleanse me oh lord skin me and make me new –_

Her spit lands on his cheek, and he shuts his eyes.

His heart rate has spiked. His skin is grating, sandpaper. Every hair is on end. His throat closes. Muscles tense.

Acid in his throat. Phosphorus in his bones. 

Vision black around the edges, her defiant abomination of a face, she’s panting, she’s begging him to act, she is all spite and rage and she has no guilt, no respect, no understanding. She is a child. He wants to hit her. _Their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death_. Her flesh beneath his palm, the crunch of a breaking nose. _His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire._ Her body underneath him again, feeling her struggle, whimper. _The wages of sin is death._

His hands clench and the bowl fragments in his hands.

_Control yourself._

He swallows.

“I understand you are in pain.” His voice shakes. “I do understand.”

She doesn’t reply, but her eyes say it all – a mocking, vicious look that spits – no you don’t. Don’t you even try. 

He breathes.

“I, too, have lost. My family.” His throat closes as he says it, and he takes a moment, gripping the shards of the bowl to ground himself. He does not want to speak of them, not to her. He wants to hold them close, protect them from her violence, her cruelty. But she must understand. She must be bought to understanding. “You killed my family.” He tries to keep his tone even as he says it, and feels the ceramic go deeper into his hand. It is a deep, aching pain now. Beyond the sting of a cut. Down through the layers, bruising the surrounding flesh. “I understand you… you did not know better. You did not know.” He can feel sweat pickling on his forehead. “But you know now. You understand. I am sure that, to you, we were monsters. But there was a reason. To save as many as we could. To feed them, clothe them, shelter them. _For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…”_ His voice trails off. He feels lightheaded. What is he trying to say?

He wants his family. He wants to be _touched._ The smell of them. There is something about the smell of your flesh, your blood. A comfort. Like coming home. The presence of them. He had found them found them found them after so long, after everything, the years wandering in the wilderness, his wife’s opened skull and his little baby girl and the prison and the bleak emptiness of it all and the burn of the voice, bright as a new star, and terrible.

Then his family.

His cheeks are wet.

“My brothers were hurt. They were flawed, and full of sin. And they were mine. You… you took them. You…” He can’t breathe. Lord, where are his lungs? They are full of liquid. Salt-water. “They died drenched in sin, and you took from them the fruit of their deeds, the goodness, the _end_ that would have justified their horror. The Lord will know their hearts. He will see their souls, shining through the pain and dark, I am sure of it, he will show them mercy, but you? You killed them before _they_ could see it. You stole, from them, the knowledge that they were _good-”_ He’s rambling now. The pain is rising, swelling against the barriers, brimming over.

No. No. No.

Close his eyes. Count his breathes. _You are here for a reason. She is here for a purpose. The Lord will reveal. He will not abandon you._

Joseph forces a smile onto his face, then opens his eyes.

The deputy looks terrified. Her eyes, huge and dark as bruises, her body tensed, her jaw trembling. He looks down to where she’s staring.

The shards of the bowl are stained, and his hands are slick with blood.


	9. Isaiah 5:24 so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's left kudos and compliments! It means a lot.   
> If anyone wants to leave constructive crit, please do, I'm always trying to improve.

She had forgotten what his madness looked like. She’d only seen it once before, really – the broadcast after Jacob’s death, the last of his family to be butchered, where his face had been streaked with tears and mucus, and his mouth opened in wails. No control, no viciousness, no righteousness about it. A man unable to make sense of his own loss.

And terrifying for it.

This was that, again. Joseph, gaunt and spitting as he spoke, words shaking under a veil of softness, sweat trickling down his temples and his _hands._

Hands clenching and contracting around the broken bowl, working the sharp edges deep into his flesh.

She was going to be sick. She was going to die.

She’d thought about death so much, prepared herself for it with every desperate mission, every time she flung herself off a cliff and prayed the parachute would hold, stitched up wounds that just wouldn’t _stop_ leaking. It had become a kind of mantra, a repetition in the back of her brain.

This will be it. This is when I die.

It had bought a kind of peace. She’d started taking in the wildflowers spilling across the grasslands, the frenzy of stars about her head at night. She’d tasted how sweet the mountain water was, how clean against her skin, smelt the pines and felt the lush reckless beauty of it all surge through her. Death, inevitable, unmovable, was no longer something to be feared. If anything, it had a safety – if it got too much, if she fell too deep, if there really was no way out, then…

But she doesn’t want to die like this. Buried underneath ash and bones, at the hands of a mad man.

She doesn’t pray. Her grandmother’s god is long lost to her, her aunt’s stern patriarch never moved her. The closest thing to faith she’s ever had was Ada, and look how that turned out?

But she shuts her eyes, and tries to capture again the memory of the wildflowers, the stars. Lying in sweetgrass, Boomer’s dog stink and his head on her chest, the sound of night beasts, chattering. Little Carmina’s littler hand, holding her finger tightly. Ada and her flowers.

She braces herself for a blow.

It doesn’t come. After a few moments, she opens her eyes.

He doesn’t look like he’s preparing to kill her. He’s looking down at the bloody bowl, his shredded hands, as though they belong to someone else. Shaking his head, slowly.

What the fuck is wrong with him?

As thought feeling her gaze, he lifts his head. The smile he wears is more disturbing than the blood.

“I think it’s time you go to bed.”

She doesn’t argue. She lets him untie her from the chair and half direct, half carry her to the bedroom without a fight (and the gun that goes from his hip to his hand is only part of the reason, half a reason, she’s faced worse odds before – what makes her docile is his wrongness, the stink of madness rolling from his skin in waves, she wants to whine from his proximity, his disturbing heat).

Back to the bed again.

Why has he bothered to change the sheets?

The cuffs go around one ankle, now, leaving her wrists free to breathe. She tries not to flinch at the sensation of his hands against her skin. She tries to avoid meeting his eyes. Tries to keep herself loose and neutral, not provoke him.

He stands for a moment at the end of the bed, after he’s cuffed her to it. His entire body is tense. The shirt is staining with sweat.

Before she can react (she’s exhausted, underfed, drugged up and wracked and she still hates her body for being so damn numb, so slow) he’s gripped her shoulders (strong hands, all of him is strong, to take him down it would take cunning, a weakness in him, she would have to find the _crack_ ) and lowered his face and-

He kisses her, on the top of her head. She stiffens with the sudden heat of his lips against her hair, the touch of his hands on her shoulders, the smell of him, the awful _humanness_ of it. She wants to cry.

He holds her.

Then he’s stalked from the room, the door shutting firmly on his back.

She breathes. The top of her head is burning.

_Fuck this._

She lies back on the bed and screws her eyes shut. Everything _hurts._ Her bones feel heavy, like they’re bruising the inside of her, and the lattice work of badly-healed injuries tug insistently at her skin when she moves. She can’t remember what it felt like to exist in a body that didn’t hurt.

Every part of her that he has touched feels off, somehow. Not quite stinging, but she is too aware of it. Pin-pricks. _Riddled with light_. A line from a poem? Riddled with bullets. Holey. Holy.

What the fuck is wrong with her?

Ada wraps her arms around her, rests her forehead on Rook’s back.

_You haven’t been touched, that’s the problem, little one. A clap on the back, a helpful arm here and there don’t count for much. You stiffened when hugged, and people let go quickly. For years, it’s been like that. Over a decade. Like there was a smell about you. Like you burnt._

_He holds you, and it is tender._

Like meat.

Ada, who is dead and not-here, sighs. Rook leans back through her ghostly sister, who gets up and pads about the room, soft as a cat, brushing her fingers over the shelf, the chair. Rook finds her eyes drifting to the floor, where Dutch had been heaped. No trace of him, now.

What happened to his body?

_You shouldn’t think of that._

She can’t help it. One more body dead because of her. One more person who got too close and got all mangled for it.

_It’s not your fault._

Isn’t it? Arrogance and greed and single-minded rage. She’d heard the news, little flashes of the radio in stolen cars, repeating the endless cycle of rising violence, tensions, warnings of a world on the brink. And what had she done?

_What you could._

Not enough. And now she is here, and everyone else is…

There isn’t enough air in this room.

_They might have…_

Might have what? Survived? The Seed bunkers were gone, she’d seen to that. The only shelters left were shallow, flimsy things stocked with about enough tins for a year at most. People who weren’t dead already soon would be.

And the car…

Her one job. Get them to the bunker. Get them to safety. Pratt, Whitehorse, Joey…

She can remember her hands shaking on the wheel. Pratt’s screaming, Whitehorse shouting, Joey’s voice and the singing, the god-damn singing, rising sickeningly above the chaos. Everything red, and hot, and her body not fully under her control. Feet not fast enough on the pedals, the road lost, the sky and the ground the same, burning, everything…

And being plucked from the wreckage.

Why her? Why him?

_Hush. Don’t think of that. Think of something else._

But what else is there to think of? What else in the world? The crashes of the ruin above, the tearing wind, these things have stopped. Beyond this little hole, there’s nothing. Only silence. Barren and empty.

_Hush baby. Just breathe. Sleep._

I’ve done nothing but sleep since I got here.

_Maybe. But before that you’d been awake for days on end, barely eating, sleeping on hard ground and coming to at the slightest sound. When was the last time you slept without a gun, a knife?_

_You need to sleep._

_I promise it will be better._

_Sleep._

It feels like she’s letting go of a cliff edge, and falling. It feels like drowning.

Rook breathes out, and gives herself away.

There are no dreams. Or at least, none that she remembers.

When she wakes Ada is nowhere, but at least her head is clear. She’s sweated heavily through the fabric of the dress, and the sweat smells like bliss. Bloody, sweet.

_That’s the last of it. Hopefully._

Right. Think.

Wrists: bled through the bandages. Torso: littered with wounds, the old broken rib still giving her grief. Face: stiff and barely healed, from the feel of it. And legs? She stretches them, and winces. Jesus that hurts. The familiar ache of over-exerted muscles, combined with the numbness of underuse, the resulting stabs of pain when she moves them.

She hisses through the pain, and flexes her protesting feet, does the same with her fingers.

Right. First things first, bring your body back to yourself. This is your body. No one else’s. You control it. Yours.

_Ada drawing an outline of her with chalk on the ground. Say it. My body. Mine._

While she conducts this painful little ritual, she forces herself to think.

What does she know? Other than the obvious – that she’s locked up with a lunatic. With a gun. What else?

He’s fed her (maybe that’s why she’s thinking clearer – precious calories giving her brain something to eat besides itself), bandaged her, kept her reasonably clean. Her panicked, instinctive fear of before was irrational (and, really, that was the bliss, wasn’t it? The languid poison licking her into compliance, submission, terror). He wasn’t going to kill her. He wanted her alive.

Alive for what? She shivers. Remembers binged podcasts, salacious articles in magazines at the dentists. All cults had at least a few things in common – the charismatic, dominating leader (check), the doctrine (check), the control (triple check), and…

The creepy sex shit. 

But, she remembers, wasn’t that Hurk’s major complaint? No fucking for the peggies.

_“But my theory, dep, is actually – nah hear me out, cos listen, yeah? Peggies = pegging. ERGO-” Sharky waving his beer in the air as she snorted into her drink, “-what’s actually happening, see, is that John And Joseph and ESPECIALLY fucking Jacob, they’re getting people into those bunkers, yeah, and they’ve got, not guns see, but just WALLS and WALLS of DILDOS, yeah? And the thing is, to join the cult, you’ve gotta pick your weapon, as it were, pick the brother then get them bent over and – fuck!”_

At that point Jess had shot the drink out of his hand, successfully shutting him up before they were all treated to a mental image they’d never be able be free of.

She’s smiling. There’s something almost like a laugh lodged in her throat.

But it won’t come out. It can’t. Sharky, Jess, Hurk, they’re gone. Burnt up, or lying above her in the toxic filth, being eaten from the inside.

She remembers a podcast she’d listened too, when she’d been really into them. Something about Chernobyl, about how the people died, their cells shredded in their bodies, skin falling off them, lying in puddles of pus and blood…

Focus, Rook.

She takes those thoughts, wraps them up and pushes them, carefully, away. There will be time. Too much time.

What was she thinking about? Ah yes.

The minor issue of whether or not Joseph was inclined to abide by his own doctrine, or if he was about to rape her.

Yanno? Cheery shit.

But he doesn’t look at her how John had; no licked lips and hooded eyes. His gaze doesn’t stray to her breasts – not even the ugly _wrath,_ protruding above the neckline of the dress. She doesn’t _think_ he’s got some _sex-slave-brood-mare-captive-harem-BDSM_ kink going on.

Let’s say it’s not sex. And it’s certainly not some bizarre grudging-respect-we-may-have-been-enemies-but-in-another-world-we-would-have-been-friends bullshit. He has absolutely _no_ affection for her, that’s been obvious. So what is it?

Ah, yes. God’s plan.

Rook pauses where she’s massaging her foot. Then she snorts. God’s _fucking_ plan.

“You are awake.” She freezes. Ice down her spine. Panicked bile. Hackles raised.

_Shit._

_He’s at the door._

She doesn’t look up. Slowly, slowly, moving as though she’s facing a cougar, a Judge, she lets go of her ankle, then inches herself against the headboard of the bed, until her foot tugs the handcuff chain taut.

He doesn’t seem to notice her, busying himself instead about the room. When she’s finally feeling safe enough to look, she notes that he’s placed a tray on the ground. More soup, judging by the smell, a glass of water, a medkit.

She tries not to flinch when he sits himself on the bed.

A silence, thick and oppressive, sinks over them. She can feel the heat radiating from his body. She lifts her right leg away from him, as subtly as she can, wrapping her arms around it and staring at her left foot, where it is bound.

She wants to kick him, hit him, scream _goawaygoawaygoaway._

Instead, she looks.

A small mercy – he isn’t looking back. His gaze is fixed resolutely on the flag on the wall, the one mutilated by his cross. It feels like a kind of freedom, to be able to see him, even for a moment, without being struck by his eyes.

His manic energy of before is gone. Either he’s got a better mask on, or he’s no longer wavering quite so precariously between unhinged and flat-out deranged. The cheeks are still gaunt and discoloured, but he smells of soap. His hands, clasped deliberately on his lap, are bandaged.

She doesn’t look away fast enough when he turns his head, and she’s caught again in the searchlight eyes. Her spine is made of glass.

He doesn’t hold her gaze. Instead, his eyes shift to her wrists.

“I have been praying.” He keeps looking at the bandaged wounds. “I have prayed for many hours while you slept. I am not yet… certain of your direct purpose. But I know you have one.”

_With any luck that purpose isn’t to do with my vagina._

“Until such a time that I am enlightened, I do not want us to be enemies. You are a child of God. My child.” He speaks very purposefully.

_Is that supposed to be a comfort? You told me about your daughter, you delusional fuckwit. The last thing on earth I want to be is your fucking child._

“I believe that we are meant to understand one another. You do not yet see that.” His eyes are back to hers. She has a sudden thought of beetles, skewered on white card. “But you shall.”

He reaches for her, then, and even though she moves back, pushing herself away so far that the cuff bites into her ankle, his hands are somehow around her wrist without a struggle. As though she’d never tried to escape.

His movements are without violence, but more terrible for that, as he holds her in place and unwraps the bandages. She doesn’t flinch when they peel away with scabs and bits of skin. Proud, even now.

He examines her wrists, makes a faint humming noise as he considers. Then he turns burnt-blue eyes back up to her.

“We will leave them uncovered. Let them heal in the air. Be careful not to damage them further.”

_I didn’t damage them in the first place, did I? That was you, so let’s drop this paternal caretaker bullshit. We both know what you are. Or at least, I know you._

_I’ve got no fucking clue how you see yourself._

The pain of the antiseptic startles her from her thoughts, and she breathes in sharply despite herself. A little noise, but he responds immediately, looking up and _smiling,_ as though in comfort.

It makes her sick.

“It will not hurt for long.”

_I know that! I know that you fucker! I’ve had so much worse than this, I’ve lived through so much worse!_

It’s a howl in her head, but she fixes her lips tight together against it. She doesn’t have much power here. Dependant on him for food, water, care, the right to sleep, the right to _shit._ But he can’t make her talk. It feels like a small, fragile power, but it’s all she has.

His fingers dab ointment on her wounds. Small, circular motions that sting, make the rest of her skin prickle, her spine shiver. And why is that? His intent, maybe. No one has ever looked at her, touched her, the way her enemy does. It’s a dissection.

His fingers are calloused. She’d expect them to be soft, like John’s had been, but they’re almost rough.

He looks up.

Jesus fuck, she wishes he’d stop smiling.

But she can see beneath it, yes she can. It’s not the smile of a father, however he might paint it. Not the smile of a pastor, or a teacher, it’s not benevolent and kind. It’s a mask, and it’s a predator’s mask.

_I see you, mother fucker._

“Deputy,” his voice is amiable, “there’s no need to look at me like that. I will not harm you.”

She scoffs.

_Like hell you won’t._

Is that a little flash of irritation? It should make her afraid, but instead she feel a little urge of satisfaction.

_I see you._

He gets himself under control, quickly, pushing back the frustration with a swallow, with a clenching of his jaw. She’s pleased to note that this is accompanied by him turning away, to again regard the flag on the wall. As though he doesn’t trust himself to look at her.

Is he counting his breaths?

“You will understand,” he mutters so lowly she almost doesn’t hear it. Then he rises up, walks out, leaving her with an open door and a bowl of rapidly cooling soup.

He doesn’t try to speak to her again for a while. She loses track of time easily, even without the bliss, so she couldn’t say how long the silence lasts for. All she knows is his visits with bottled water, bowls of increasingly thick soup, his disturbingly gentle touch as he bandages her wounds, and the awful humiliation of semi-regular bathroom visits. He helps her limp there every time, and he doesn’t give her privacy, though he has the grace to look away as she pisses or shits unceremoniously into the bowl.

She doesn’t care. She’s lived through worse.

She’s pretty sure he cares.

But she can feel herself getting stronger. And the dreams, without the stain of the bliss, are mercifully lonely. Sometimes she walks through honeycomb tunnels under the earth, or through the mountains of her childhood, or the Whitetails. She swims in rivers, and there are no fish, no birdsong. The world is green, and empty. Strange, though, because even though it is always bright the sky is grey, or empty black at night.

She works on gathering her strength, on learning to lock away anything too painful, anything that threatens the fragile grasp she’s getting on herself.

There isn’t the bliss. Ada-Mae doesn’t talk anymore. But sometimes she still feels her sister, curled up beside her in the bed, sitting in the other room, or even above, the ghost laden with wildflowers walking through atomic dust.

She’s quietly, half-willingly, going mad.

The peace doesn’t last long.

She wakes up from a dream of ruins and red apples to something watching her.

Her immediate reaction is to reach for her knife – but of course, there’s no knife anymore, is there? Nothing, nothing to protect herself from the shadow in the door, the tall thing with hissing breath, where it stands, where it tenses, where it starts to _walk –_

She whimpers when Joseph’s fingers close around her unchained foot.

He’s turned the lights off, the artificial night he’s taken to creating periodically, so she can’t see his face – can only make out the sharp outline of his body, smell that inhuman sweat, gunpowder, she read that space smells of gunpowder, that the abyss smells like it’s burning, and even though she tries to kick herself free she _can’t,_ she fucking _can’t,_ he’s crawling _up_ her body, his knee on her leg, his body pressed against hers and his rough palms around her face, throat, her hands and arms are weak, she can’t budge him, she’s reaching for his eyes but she can’t see, she can’t breathe, she can’t –

“Your name.”

All the gentleness is gone from him. How his voice is too low. A growl. A croak.

_Inhuman._

Aunty had believed in possession. The intrusion of demons into your skin, the way they weighted down your tongue, twisted open your mouth. Rook had thought she was crazy.

She believes her now, looking at the thing crouched on her.

It’s worse, somehow, not being able to see his eyes, because she can still _feel them._ Peeling back her skin and flesh, straight through to the tortured nerves, the bone.

“I want. Your name.”

_No. No._

She shakes her head, and he _snarls_. For a moment she thinks he’s going to hit her, and she tenses instinctively, but instead his hand collides with the wall, again again again. His hair is wild around his head, and his chest is bare, slick with frenzied sweat.

He leans over her again, and sweat drips onto her face.

“You will talk.” He’s saying it almost to himself. “You will talk.”

Flashes of brutality. John’s knife, Jacob’s starvation, Faith’s drugged-up hellscapes. There are so many ways he could try to force something from her throat.

But instead, he gets up. The cold air hits her. She’s soaked through with his sweat.

“You will talk.” He mutters to himself, and staggers from the room. 


	10. And I saw a woman revelations 17:6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More a character study than anything else, while i try to put into place what happens next

He makes himself a rosary.

_When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence_ _._

He’s been attempting to implement some structure into the days. Fifteen hours of light, nine of darkness. During that fifteen he cleans, counts out rations, exercises, reads, prays. Fruitlessly twists the radio, desperate for the static to part and reveal the voices of his flock. His children.

Those who depended upon him, who needed him, who he has failed.

He cuts himself.

He forces himself to bring her food, to keep her clean, walk her to the toilet and feel the sneer on his turned back as she relieves herself. He screws his eyes shut and asks for patience.

There is no voice.

He rubs the skin of his temples till it is red and peeling.

In the silence, he becomes aware that the world above is quiet. No winds howling, no screams, not even the sound of rain. He imagines a blanket of dust, pressing down on them, and he wakes up hyperventilating.

_And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm._

John, when he was little, would put his little hand through his when he could not breathe, and he would wrap his skinny arms around him. Jacob would crouch, press his palms on Joseph’s skull, ground him.

The abscess opens, stitch by stitch. He wants to dig his fingers into himself, pull out his guts, steaming. He can feel his brain rotting, rank and heavy. Waterlogged.

The silence of her. The whole place stinking with it. Her scowling, contorted face, mouth bitten small and huge haunting eyes too much too much too much didn’t try to push her but there she was mute and full of fury and –

He is desolate. He feels like gristle.

Feels her beating through him, a drum. The hollow pulse of her.

Dreams, dreams were the worst. Their mouths open and black, screaming, he could feel their pain lancing through him, choking on their blood, nothing nothing stopped them and then

He found himself looking at her as she slept.

_And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs_

Dress riding up, the tangle of her legs. The heavy velvet of her sweat.

Wanted to peel off her skin. Crack open her skull and force his fingers inside.

The feeling of his hand against the wall. The little finger cracking.

Rosary.

He makes himself a rosary. He prays.


	11. Judith 9:14 Give me constancy in my mind that I may despise him

She’s going to have to kill him, she thinks, after she’s finished vomiting stomach lining and chicken soup onto the floor.   
Ada, who has returned to run fingers through her hair, tugging on her scalp, hums at the thought, though whether it’s in approval or doubt Rook can’t tell.   
Hardly as though it matters, given that her sister is made of exhaustion and hunger and trauma and Bliss.   
Kill him. Rid the world of Joseph seed. That’s what she came here to do, isn’t it? Somehow, though, it seems more impossible now, buried under the dust-drift and ruins, no more than a few feet from the man, than it was with an army of his faithful between them.   
She should have shot him in the fucking car, and died with her friends.   
She isn’t dead now, though, not yet anyway – though if this latest outburst was anything to go by, it might not be long. She doesn’t much fancy waking up with his hands around her neck, spit dribbling into her mouth, the frayed eyes with a mad-man looming over her.   
But he didn’t kill you, Ada, gentle, reminds.   
There’s always time.   
Time. Exactly. Time, suffocating under the rubble, alone.   
Great. Food will last longer.   
Your brain will eat itself.   
I’ll eat him first. Barbecue him up on the stove. Find some mustard.   
Ada heaves a ghostly, pained sigh.   
And how will you do it? You’re bound to the bed, baby, and he’s got that gun. You’re malnourished.  
So’s he.   
He’s mad.   
So am I.   
The thought is more reassuring than frightening.   
No.   
I am. I’m talking to you, aren’t I?   
Rook turns, and she can see Ada’s fragile face in the almost-total dark, even if she’s only half here – like an optical illusion, skittering out of sight, making Rook’s eyes ache. Ada is shaking her head.   
Rook knows she’s right. Knows that killing Joseph will only stave off the inevitable. But so what? She’d rather die with slit wrists, after a couple of years of radio static and the knowledge that everyone is dead because of her own weaknesswrathcowardicepride, than die giving him any kind of absolution.   
But he didn’t want you dead, did he? Didn’t even want your flesh – no tongue in your mouth, no fingers sticking up you. Didn’t hit you, even. Only wanted your name.   
But that’s worse. So vast and trembling, so much worse. First he wants her name. Then, he wants to hear her speak. Then, he will want her to talk.   
She’s watched him – or rather, his effects. She’s tracked his reach across a county, seen the followers with prayer bitten mouths, the bodies crucified with deer skulls and flowers, the holy madness rolling in waves from Jacob, John, Faith. Skinny, bald bodies drowned in the incense of his faith. Everything echoed with him, his words thudding like rosary beads.  
Not to me. Not to me.   
Babygirl, think. This isn’t wise. You don’t want to do this.   
But Rook has never been so certain of anything in her life. Who’s to say, afterall, that next time he comes clawing answers from her throat he’ll stop there? And there is a certain reassurance in having a plan, even a mad, suicidal one. In being able to do something.   
She ignores Ada’s faint attempts to dissuade her, wraps herself in a ball, and waits. 

By the time he comes for her again, lights flickering on in a sterile morning, she’s had to piss on the floor, and her mouth is parched. She’s started shaking, a little, with cold, and she isn’t certain if it’s because the temperature has dropped or she’s become increasingly aware of her surroundings, of the way her flesh sits around her bones. She’s always had poor circulation.  
He approaches warily, his eyes lucid, glinting (though that’s a fucking joke, isn’t it, the illusion of sanity stretched across lunatic bones, she’s not about to be taken in by that), and he pauses just within the threshold. As though he’s respecting her boundaries.   
Asshole.   
She feels his eyes rake over her, a calculation of her trembling, the puddle of urine next to the bed, and…  
The wall.   
She doesn’t want to speak to him – doesn’t want to give him that satisfaction. Maybe when she’s got him in front of him, gasping and gurgling with a blood-filled throat, then she’ll let him hear her voice. John, she will croak, had so much faith in you, even at the end. Speaking of Faith, she was so afraid – do you think she loved you? Or only feared? And Jacob, poor butchered Jacob, offering himself like a sacrifice, like offal from the butchers. You failed them all. Just like your wife. Your tiny, strangled babe. How satisfying, to watch him flood with incomprehensible pain, horror, blind and tongueless grief and guilt, searing into his bones. She’s familiar with guilt. So brutal, so violent, like phosphorous rot. Let that be his last thought.   
But till then – no sound.   
Instead, she’s scraped and bitten blood from her fingers, stretched out the sheet like parchment, and written.   
Rook.   
Not her full name. Not even her first. But something. Perhaps enough for him to think she’s caving – that these shuddered hours have got to her, that her grey matter is just stagnated enough to make her pliant. Stick your fingers in my skull, rake them across the fat inside. Don’t you want that feeling? Like pressing your thumb into my mouth, like slipping your hand underneath my skin.   
He swallows when he reads it, and she bites her tongue in triumph. His eyes, when he raises them, are fat with satisfaction.   
“Rook.” He says it slowly, paying attention to each sound, and she can almost feel it, as though she’s speaking herself – the half-guttural start, hollow middle, sharp, final ‘k’ cutting off in the back of his mouth.   
She could have given him another other name.   
But perhaps there was some part of her that wanted to be spoken into being again.   
She nods. 

He cleans up her puddle of urine, then frees her ankle from its restraint, helping her stand. She forces herself not to flinch at the burn of his skin, but can’t help herself stumbling when her feet hit the floor and dissolve into painful sparks. He’s quick though – not sooner has she sagged against him than he’s hitched one arm beneath her knees, lifting her up as though she weighs next to nothing.   
Her face against the fabric of his shirt, nostrils flooded with the ignited smell of his sweat. Pressed against him, she’s aware that he’s shaking, though whether it’s from the effort of holding her, or excitement at having finally made some headway, she can’t tell.   
He takes her into the bathroom, and though the door is open he stays outside while she uses the toilet, makes her shuffling way to the shower and crouches, exhausted, in the spray. She can hear him muttering, outside, even if she can’t make out the words.   
He even gives her a toothbrush.   
Playing along has some benefits, at least.   
A change of clothes – loose sweatpants, underwear (men’s boxes, she notes, and wonders if Dutch actually bought any women’s underwear, or if Joseph is simply too squeamish to try and pick out some for her) t-shirt, jumper, and big woollen socks that make her want to cry. They look so comfortable.   
She’s shaking as she towels herself off, keeping half an eye on the man’s back in the doorway – is this the time? Leap at him from behind, wrap her fingers around his throat, use her full weight to bear him to the ground and bash in the skull, the tangle of brains within?   
As if. She’s so weak she’s having to lean against the bathroom wall to stay upright, barely catching her breath, legs shaking. Plus there’s that pistol in the holster on his leg. How many bullets inside?   
“Rook.” Her name again, it makes her jump, in that deep voice, with its controlled tone, its rough edges. “Do you require assistance?”  
Fuck off. Don’t touch me. Come near me, I’ll pop my thumbs through your sockets.   
No. Be sensible.   
You want him to trust you, don’t you? What better way than to let him think you need him.   
She doesn’t want to talk, she’s saving that, but she makes a little sound – back of the throat, between a hum and a whimper. He turns immediately.   
There’s a moment where he’s got his eyes fixed on her with that penetrating stare of his, calculating.   
He can see it. He knows. What you’re planning, what you’re waiting for, fuck fuck fuck, Rook, he knows.   
She almost wishes he’d stayed unhinged. This fluctuating, between authority and madness, is too much.   
But the look is fleeting, replaced almost immediately by… sympathy.   
Fuck, she hates that look. Waterlogged, bliss-blown, caged, she’d always got that look.   
The devil’s grace.   
“Of course you need help,” if she didn’t know better she’d say he sounded almost ashamed, frustrated with his own stupidity, “I’m sorry, Rook.” He comes forward, hands outstretched, face mild. “Let me dress you.”   
What the hell, he’s seen her naked before.   
She drops the towel without hesitating, and he looks away. Not in embarrassment, but respectfully. It sets her teeth on edge.   
“Here.” He picks up the boxers. “If you lean on me, perhaps you may step into them?” He’s on his knees now, in front of her, holding the garment. Is this her chance? Fall on his neck, break it with the force of her body. Make a move for that gun.   
No. Despite his gentle tone, the muscles of his back hum with coiled energy under her fingers. He’s still on his guard.   
She’s trying to ignore how close his head is to her cunt. He’s quite tall, and she’s quite short . If he got up even slightly, he’d have a face full of crotch.   
Actually, that might be funny.   
But no, no time to think about that. Instead she steps gingerly into the pants, using his back and the wall for balance, unable to put enough faith in her shaking legs to hitch up the clothes herself. She lets him do it.   
Say what you will about the fanatic before her, but when he’s not crouched on top of her half naked and muttering he’s quite respectful, averting his gaze and keeping his hands a safe distance from her skin as he dresses her. Even so, the heat of his hands makes her skin ripple.   
She could knee him in the face.   
She could fall over backwards.   
He stands, slowly, giving her time to transfer her hands to the wall. He’s holding the t-shirt, and his eyes seem dark.   
“Arms up.”   
She’s obedient without thinking, lifting the arms, concentrating on holding herself upright by her legs alone as he tugs the top over her bare chest. When it’s only half down, still obscuring her vision, her legs give a painful wobble – but there’s his hand, branding onto the skin of her waist, holding her steady as the other swiftly pulls the t-shirt down.   
His face is very close to hers, and she’s breathing in his air. Something once inside him, now flooding through her nostrils, her teeth, flecks of his skin, too, probably, sparks of DNA coating her mouth.   
She swallows, and goes through the rest of the ritual with closed eyes. 

When the whole thing is done, she’s half hoping he’ll take her back to bed – not to sleep, but this weakness is humiliating, and her legs and, for some reason, back, are starting to feel like aching jelly.   
No such luck.   
“Would you like to eat?”  
She hates that voice of his – low, mild, full of fatherly concern. He has no right to speak like this, when (hours? days?) before he had hunted her in the dark, chained her to the bed, and before that… she shakes her head, but a traitorous rumble in her belly gives her away.   
She hates the gentle smile he gives her.   
“Come.” Offering his arms for her to lean against – the other side to the gun, she notices, which his hand hovers over, even as he leads her from the bathroom.   
“I have found, these past few days, much help in prayer,” (the hand over the gun has a rosary strung over it – is that his old one? It looks different, paler), “and I believe it has cleared my head. I see a path before us, now,” (they go into the corridor, and all the doors are shut – to the comms room, med room, of course the weapons room – probably locked, too, leaving her with only corridors and lounge, bath and bedroom), “and you have proved me right. Thank you, Rook,” (her stomach twists as he says her name), “for seeing what I have.”   
He deposits her, gently, on the chair.   
He doesn’t bind her wrists.


	12. Tread our sins underfoot Micah 7:19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to thank everyone for taking the time to comment and leave kudos! It means so much.

Adrenalin is making him shake.

Calm yourself, Joseph. You do not wish to frighten her.

More than you already have.

Widepoolingeyesstrugglinglimbsteethglintinginthedarklikeacorneredferalthing-

He steeples his fingers together, draws his brows into the well-worn expression of benevolent concern he has perfected, and smiles at the woman sat across the table.

His heart is hammering violently, a thing in a cage, bloodied against his ribs.

_She gave me her name._

He exhales a shaky breath to calm himself.

_Rook._ All this time, he’d assumed it was a nickname, diminutive form of rookie, a nod to her newness, her age, the rawness of her face and skin that belied her relative inexperience, at least compared to her colleagues.

But it is her name. Like the bird, the chess-piece, the chariot wheeling across the board.

_She could be lying._

No. He’s good at seeing lies, and her face when he’d read that bloodied scrawl (he ought to offer her band-aids for her torn up fingers) was wary, defiant, vulnerable. Exposed – more exposed than when she was naked before him, her skin raised with goosebumps inches from his fingers –

Why does that image rise? Think away from that, look away, focus-

She gave him her name. There’s some hope in this business yet.

He had prayed for days, on her, ever since he’d staggered from her room and strung dried chickpeas into rosary beads in desperation, aware he could not let himself lose control again, aware that the cacophony of _your-name-your-name-speak-to-me-let-me-hear-it-from-your-mouth-you-have-eaten-all-their-sins-I-see-them-move-beneath-your-flesh-like-worms-you-are-crawling-with-it-you-must-let-me-clean-you-must-let-me-in-you-owe-me-that-you-owe-me-you’ve-fed-the-devils-and-bought-them-here-below-_

Aware that it was dangerous.

He’d been surprised, after, when the thick-blood of the fog had lifted from his eyes and throat, when he was on his second circuit of the beads, surprised to find his little finger broken.

He’d splinted it to its neighbour, and returned to prayer.

Only when he was certain that he would not overstep, would not be compelled to touch her, try and force her tongue from her mouth and pour his words into her throat, did he return –

And find a holy thing.

_Rook._

His insides are on fire with it.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, “Rook. For your name.”

Her throat moves as she swallows, the corner of her mouth twitches down wards, there’s an almost imperceptible line between her brows, and she looks to his left, not meeting his eyes.

_She’s conflicted. At hearing her name in his mouth._

But he can convince her. Instinctively, he leans across the table, stretching out his hands, palms up. Waiting, not removing his eyes from her face.

Give your hands to me.

Is she wary? Is she afraid? Does she doubt him, after everything? What is that in her bruised, cracked open eyes? He could almost call it curiosity. He can almost see a challenge.

She places her hands in his, and his fingers close around them.

Her palms and fingerprint are rough, calloused from gun holds and knife work. The thumb of her right hand is missing half the nail, and what remains is a puce-purple bruise. He traces his finger over it, and she doesn’t flinch. These cuts along the edges of her fingers are deep. Did she use her teeth? Her nails? Self-mutilation takes resolve. Overlooking the pain, it goes against all instinct to wreck your own flesh. And with nails, and teeth...

He is almost touched at the effort she has gone to, for him. 

“I know you have your doubts. I know you think me mad, even now.”

She doesn’t react, but there’s a slight flicker in her eyes, spiked with fear. He glances his thumbs over the top of her hands, firm, soft circles. The tension of her shoulders eases, slightly.

In the end, the human is an animal, like any other. Divinity might surge deep inside the marrow, God’s promises knotting up the spinal cord and surging nerves, but around this is a casing of all too mammalian flesh. Reassurance, on a primal level, is easy bought with a low tone of voice, solid, gentle movements.

All they want is a father. Even her, with her vicious, bitten lips.

“But you must think more. Want more. We are here, at the end of days, together. My hands were guided to you, your eyes to me. Even since I saw you in my church. I knew. I Knew. I have,” he swallows back the bile of shame, “doubted it. I have struggled with it. It will not be easy for me, to overcome… to overlook… what you have done-” his body betrays him then, a painful, gagged sob and sting in his eyes. He looks away, shut them against the burn of tears.

_Compose yourself. Hold yourself. You cannot be weak._

- _In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace…do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy._

_Tread our sins underfoot and hurl_

“-all our iniquities into the depths of the sea,” he murmurs the scripture’s end aloud, for more his sake than hers, feeling the world like fresh water, cool and clean, washing clear his throat. He smiles.

She’s afraid. She’s trying to hide it, with her stoic jaw and frozen face, but her eyes reveal too much, and there’s the increased pulse below her skin, the constricted pupils in the dark sea of her irises.

_My blasphemy, my blessing. My enemy. My child._

“Are you familiar with scripture?”

She gives a hesitant nod.

“Good.” There is slight grime in the corner of her eye, he has a sudden urge to brush it away with a wettened thumb.

She twists her mouth, awkward in his scrutiny, and her hands twitch in his as though she means to pull them away – but on reflex, he tightens his grip. Not enough to hurt her. Strong enough to trap her.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness,” he recites, voice hoarse over the words. “You know this?”

Nods, again.

“So you understand why I would have you speak? What you must speak of?” He fights to keep the calm, measured tone of his voice, hide the urgency pounding through him. “I know you have been bought to me for a reason. To be my family. And as my child, to walk in the light of His Grace, you must confess, you must-”

She gives a little whimper.

_God forgive him._

His hands have moved to her wrists, twisting round them, the skin blanched where he touches her.

_Abject. Abject. I am abject. An abhorrence._

“Forgive me. My child.”

He lets her go and no longer meets her eyes. That is enough, for now. He does not trust himself with further interaction. Instead, he carefully wipes clean and wraps her damaged fingers, and gives her soup again, this time thickened with tinned vegetables, oil to increase the calories, supplements and water alongside. Better nutrition.

He eats the same, and is forced to face, once again, that a nutritionally sound meal does not mean an edible one. Nonetheless, they struggle through their bowls of sludge, before he takes her back to her room. Already resigned to her captivity, his poor child limps to the bed, lying back and facing away, waiting for him to chain her again.

Such docility. Where has this come from? It doesn’t sit right, it puts him on edge.

Toying with the key, he considers the woman. She has not shown any significant self-destructive tendencies as of late, overlooking her torn fingers, and while it would be far from wise to let her roam completely free…

“I will lock the door,” he says, and leaves before he can let paranoia change his mind, locking the door. Leaving her unchained.

He spends the rest of the day in prayer, running through supplies, assessing possible catastrophes that might arise in future – the generator, according the Dutch’s notes, is supplied by solar panels (useless currently, he imagines), a wind-turbine, hydroelectricity, and, should all else fail, physical fuel. Should all of its supplies become blocked, they will be forced to wait, to pray the issue resolves itself, use precious fuel, or venture into the abyss beyond.

He exercises, jogs around the little cage, checks on the deputy (Rook) to reassure himself she’s breathing, prays, returns to the radio (avoids looking at the pictures of his family, nailed to the wall).

When it is time for morning, he unlocks her door, pleased to see her waiting patiently on her bed. Is it really that easy? Only an apocalypse, and the heretic becomes a little saint. She even struggles over to him, though refuses his proffered hand, leaning against the walls to support her as he leads her to the bathroom.

Stubborn still. There’s that pride.

He feels almost admiration, as he watches the dark little head in front of him, making her determined way to the shower. He’s caught off guard when she strips off her top without warning, baring unshaved armpits and small breasts before he has a chance to look away.

He wishes, with a burning fervour, that she’d stop so thoughtlessly removing her clothes. It’s harder to look at her naked when she’s awake. He’s aware it’s just a body, just skin, made in His Image as they all are, but…

But.

It’s not lust. There’s no stir of desire, no echo of arousal. But there is an _awareness_ of her body that is perverse. He can almost feel each ridge of scar tissue, the indentations of the stitches (the ones on her face and neck must be removed tomorrow, he must not forget), the crook of her elbow and the coarse tangle of her pubic hair.

His breath catches. Too intimate, too close.

His wife was rarely naked – old fashioned bathing suits with little skirts attached, dresses skimming her knees, blouses never opening low. Not from his own urgings, but her own sense of modesty. Sweet, and pious, and quiet, and good. Opening only for him, like a flower, privates pink and trimmed, eyes soft and limpid.

He doesn’t know why he’s thinking of his wife.

When Rook has finally dressed herself again (no help needed, this time) he takes her to the sitting room. Her eyebrows raise, slightly, at the yoga-mat on the floor.

“Your body has been still for too long. You need to stretch.”

She searches his face, still a little wary, but shrugs off whatever doubts she has when he offers her help onto the floor, so she can lie on her back.

He starts with her feet.

No sooner have his thumbs pressed into the arch than she’s hissing with pain, kicking in his hands – but he maintains his grip, working her through the initial discomfort with steady, kneading strokes.

“I know it hurts,” he digs his fingers below the ball join of her large toe, and she moans, “but it will help. _Anything dead coming back to life hurts_.” She freezes when he says that, and her expression is one of utter confusion.

He could almost laugh.

“Toni Morrison. Beloved. Are you surprised that I have read it,” he flexes her foot back suddenly, and she pummels her hands against the floor, hissing again, “or that I have remembered it? My reading was not limited,” her foot bends the other way, but she seems to have gotten her breathing under control now, at least, “to the bible. I could recite Angelou for you, if you wished, or a philosopher? Foucault, or Plato, perhaps Descartes?” He places the foot gently to the floor, picking up the other – this one, he knows, rubbed around the ankle from the restraint – more care, needed. “There was a time in my life, when I was young, little more than a child, that I found myself on the streets. And the library was… a kind of salvation, I suppose. In prison, too.”

He lifts the leg up, abruptly, in a way that makes her groan again but should, also, stretch out the calf. She’s got her arms covering her face, now, hiding what he is fairly sure are tears.

_More pride._

He works his fingers into the muscle.

“I found myself especially moved by liberation theology. Gutierrez work impossibly beautiful, the perfect synthesis,” the other leg, and she’s stopped flinching, doesn’t even make a sound, simply lets him work life back into her flesh, “between the word of God and the lived experience of man. For how can one read His Word and not conclude that poverty, inequality, injustice, are not only an affront to our fellow man, but to Our Lord himself? There was a reason he came as a carpenter, that he preached to the low and the outcast, the lunatics and whores. Of course,” he lays the legs down, gently, “none of these men knew, for how could they, that the world was too far gone. That God had already decided on a flood of wormwood. That greed and violence had poisoned too much, that the rot was too deep. That an amputation was required.” Her chest, beneath the blue sweater, is rising and falling more slowly, her breathing calmer. “I wish it had not come to this.”

Her face uncovered, her eyes snap open at that.

Foolish.

He hadn’t mean to say that. No doubt should be allowed to show. No regret.

“You should eat,” he gets to his feet, avoiding her gaze, “you need to build your strength.”

He sticks to bible passages after that, avoiding even his own word. He has never had a barrier, when it came to sharing his history – rather, had forced himself to reveal as much as he could, every story, every sin, so that he might be known.

Avoided, perhaps, those details which would not be understood. Unwilling to see certain things corrupted, turned over, contaminated by judgemental hands. Unwilling to see his daughter…

And yet he’d spoken of Her. To the deputy.

Not something he meant to do. Yet his daughter, fragile and quivering in his hands, a heartbeat, a star, she had surfaced from the dark, he had felt her nearby again, and then –

And then he was speaking of her. To Rook.

The woman had a way of splitting to the bone.

Isiah, Revelations, Genesis, while she turns from side to side, stretches, rocks back on her haunches, stands, bends.

He has strange dreams that night, the ones that he has had for years, ever since he felt the bird-body of his child falling gently, as though overcome by sleep, between his hands. That night, in the dark cell, he had been shown proof that he was on the righteous path, for here was his daughter –

  * here is his daughter, running through a wood. Not old, no more than five, but



already fast and nimble as a fox cub, ducking between the trees of what he now knows to be Hope. Though not the county he has left. No, this forest has undergone a metamorphosis. Trees are now thinner, letting in a sun of impossible brightness, and between the trees are flowers. Flowers unlike anything. A mad cacophony of burning mauve, and yellow, strung between the trees or storming the ground, the world swelling with their colour, their sweetness.

And his daughter. Dressed in skins, barefooted. He can only see the back of her head. So fast. Mad curls of red trailing behind her - darker than Jacob, but easy to see where she got it from, even when he’d held her, and she had been so small, she’d had that scarlet down on the top of her biscuity head, he’d pressed his lips to it and soaked it with his tears as he held her, and kissed her, and would not let her go till they stuck a needle in his neck and wrenched her –

He wakes up shaking, drenched in sweat.

The dream puts him in a fog. Usually it’s a hopeful one, one he might even call a vision, but the ending reminder – of the life he’d had to delay until the world was ready for her, of snuffing out that little light and feeling a part of himself shudder and collapse – that has done something strange. He feels separate from his own limbs, a kind of numbness spreading.

_Control yourself,_ he snaps, scrubbing roughly in freezing water. _Think clearly._

He needs to focus. He needs (hands unlocking the door, his voice underwater, informing Rook that her stitches need removing, her walking to the table, ahead) to surface from this, to stop the image of the red-haired child darting through the bunker, she is not here, she is not here, she is not (his hands shake on the bottle of isopropyl, spilling it, wasting it, stupid, stupid, weak) and he must not think of the smell of the top of her head.

He takes a breath. He calms himself. He can feel Rook’s eyes on his skin, and the trickles of sweat falling from the side, he steadies himself with a prayer, he realises he’s muttering it aloud and cannot stop, as he reaches for the scissors and leans forward, his hands need to be steady, stop shaking, look at the stitches splitting the corner of her face and brow, they need to come out, they need –

He meets her eyes as she moves, and he isn’t prepared. Isn’t prepared for the hand batting the scissors away, the sickening crunch as her forehead meets his nose, and the sudden scramble of her body pressed against him, her hair in her nostrils, her flesh on his skin, her hand on his leg and the gun –

Rook faces him, and clicks the safety off.


	13. Israel, I will not forget you Isaiah 44:21

**Pull the trigger. Do it. You done it before, more times than you counted. It ain’t nothin, to do it, ain’t nothin**.

_Baby._ Ada is standing behind the man, slightly to the right. Rook looks away from him, focuses on her sister’s river-wet face, the hair suffocating with flowers.

_Baby don’t do this._

**** **Ain’t gonna wait for him to kill me, though, am I?**

_I don’t want you to be alone._

**** **Fuck you, I been alone.**

_You need him._

**** **I need him dead.**

_Ain’t you tired? Of all the blood? Drownin’ in it? He was so gentle when he touched your face, his eyes so full of pain and holy fire –_

**Pull the trigger.**

_Look at him._

He isn’t afraid. He looks mournful, almost, his hands open and outstretched by his sides.

She can’t breathe.

“Rook.” Her name in his mouth. It feels like a shatter, and she tries not to flinch. “You don’t want to do this.”

She looks away from him again, focus on Ada, ignore him and his hollow, empty, vicious words, he’s full of shit, bloated like a corpse. Flies crawl under his skin and over his lips, he’s the devil.

_He might be the last person in the world._

**He’s not a person.**

Ada flinches at that, her eyes huge, as though Rook has hit her.

_You don’t mean that._

_**Course I**_ **do. What, you think I can’t the difference between a human and a fuckin’ beast? A thing? You forgot uncle? You didn’t see all those bodies I left in the forest, on the road, swollen in the water? You think I woulda killed them so abrupt, so immediate, had I not know that there was nothing under their skin, no skein of light to call a soul? Just hollow, animals, put them down, break all the hand bones till they tell you where the keys are hid.**

_He touched you tenderly. He brushed back the hair from your forehead and moved his mouth against your skin. He kissed you._

**He tryna crawl inside me.**

Rook levels the gun, lines up her sights. He isn’t moving. He’s standing, almost peaceful. A barking laugh escapes her.

**Get you a crown of thorns and jam it round your skull, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hold out your hands, I’ll find some nails before you go.**

She can feel a mad flood of sweat drenching down her skin, and she’s shaking. She’s got that breathless, damp feel of too much adrenaline.

_Little one, please._

Ada-Mae stretches out one delicate hand, uncurling like a wing, and rests it lightly on the preacher’s shoulder. Rook shivers. Her skin feels thick and heavy, her insides scrambled up. Where have her bones gone?

_You can’t do this. You do this, and you’ve lost._

**What do you mean, lost?**

_Lost everything._

Ada steps around him, in front of him, a ghostly eclipse, then towards Rook, away from him, she’s pacing around her sister and Rook is following her, keeping the gun on the man but her eyes following the hallucination of her sister as she circles, the flowers growing mad and thick around her. Her footprints leave damp puddles.

_Please._

**Why are you protecting him?**

_I’m protecting you._

**Bullshit. Bullshit. You’re not real. You’re dead. You’re fucking dead. Let me do this.**

_Baby, it’s ok, you don’t have to fight–_

“Fuck off. Fuck off! Don’t fucking talk to me about fighting, don’t you fucking dare, after everything, after everything I’ve had to do, don’t you fucking dare, just leave me! Fucking leave me!”

Ada is gone.

Hasn’t been there.

Rook’s throat has ripped. Clawed up, from the inside, she can feel blood inside her mouth. She’d heard something coming from it – guttural and rough. Something that couldn’t be her voice. Too heavy. Too full of pain. Sounds like broken ribs.

She presses a hand to her throat. It’s wet. It’s bleeding?

No, her face is wet too. Sweat and tears mingling, they’ve run down her cheeks. She can’t stop leaking. Her eyes are wretched. Why can’t she stop it? Scrub, scrub at her cheeks, hit the side of her head, try and root herself again.

“My child.” That _voice._ So full of pity, even at the end of her gun.

Then, horror of horrors, worst of all, the preacher steps forward, locking eyes with her. What can he see? What will he see, that stare like ice, like oxygen, like gasoline, it makes every frayed nerve hiss, her blood twist, she can feel every crack and bruise of her body –

Pull the trigger. Pull the trigger.

He walks forward. Places his hand on hers, where she holds the gun, and she’d craning her neck to look up and meet his gaze. There’s blood still dripping from his nose, where she broke it.

He looks like he could unpick her from her skin. Like he wants to break her backribs into wings.

And maybe, at this moment, she would let him. Maybe, feeling his hand shake on hers as he brings down the gun, she’d let him do anything to her. She’s so tired. She wants to lean forward and press her head against his shirt, let him stroke her hair. Undo those buttons so she can put her lips against another person’s skin. She wants to lean into him, until the heat of his body helps thaw out the cold she feels, and have arms around her.

She wants to be held.

She can’t really hear anything. Can’t barely feel her body. There’s the sensation of her pulse, the sound and scent of his breath, carbon dioxide and the smell of his innards. The rasp of his fingers on her hand, and his eyes…

It’s not pity.

It is hunger.

And she could have pulled the trigger, still. Could have shot him full of lead and stood over the steaming corpse.

But into this silent, breathless world, breaks a sound. Not human, not the hum of machinery, the high pitch flicker of the lights, even the bubbling fish tank, forgotten and blue in the corner. It is the distant, lonely, whimpered barking of a dog.

**_There is a world._ **

He’s batted the gun from her hands, clawing at her, but there’s something like a lightning strike run through her and she dodges him, pushing past, half scrambling half sprinting to the door –

**Something is out there. Something is alive.**

She reaches the doorframe but there he is, behind her suddenly, grasping her, slamming her hard against the wall so her eyes fizz and stutter with painful sparks –

His breath hot by her ear, his arms fixing her tight, his body pressing against her –

 _She knows that bark. That whimper. He’d made it when she’d forced him to leave, just a little distance from the compound, before she’d faced the preacher that final time._ When she’d kissed his mangy, stinky head and said goodbye.

He’s got her body pinned but not her mouth, and she lunges forward, teeth fixing on his mouth, biting down instinctively, blood spurting into her mouth –

  * and he’s so surprised, so hurt, his arms loosen enough that she has room to bring



up her knee, to get him between the legs as hard as anything, then tear away and run, leaving her skin under his nails, chunks of her hair in his clenched fist -

The corridor, the room with the showers, no time to slow, something is alive, Boomer, Boomer is alive, and if something is alive perhaps the world is not burnt, it’s bliss, that heavy shit he pumped into the air, the trauma of the crash – but what if the others live? What if everyone, above, lives, and everything was a lie, because that barking is the sound of her dog, isn’t it, after it all, he’s come for her –

_Up the stairs, her fingers scrabbling to release the hatch, Joseph shouting, wheezing behind her, his footsteps –_

The world cracks open like an egg.

There is the dog, dirt-drenched and barrelling into her arms.

Beyond him is cold, and dust, wrecked trees and a wind that howls.

Then she’s thrown downs the stairs, and Joseph is standing over her, dragging shut the hatch and turning to her with fire in his eyes – she’s sure he’s screaming, but she can’t hear him, can only see the veins standing stark in his skin, feel his spittle landing on her cheeks as she clutches her moaning animal, staggers backwards, she is desecrated, and the world is lost –

Joseph wrenches Boomer from her arms and dumps him on the ground, advancing to her with a mute snarl, his hands clawing under her jumper, tearing it off her –

  * and the dog, the little limping thing, though he can barely stand and his body



has left a bloody imprint in her arms, the dog bares his teeth and fights for her –

A kick to his side, and he falls limply on the floor.

Now she fights again, blind and gasping, but it’s no use. Joseph must have been trying to avoid hurting her before, she thinks blearily, because he’s stronger now and fuck, it hurts as he pushes her under the freezing shower and rips her naked, holding her still and scrubbing at her flesh, not flinching as her nails dig into his skin, his eyes cold and raging above her as she chokes and splutters with water –

Sound comes back to her, with the sound of the shower pounding in her ears, and she can just hear what he is growling –

“Wash the dog.”

Then he’s let her go. She crawls towards her pet, who even now opens his dark honey eyes and _fuck, after it all,_ he’s smiling at her, one ear crooked, and even though he’s so hurt his tail thumps onto the floor.

Weeping, salt water blinding her, she picks him up and carries him to the shower, kneeling naked in the spray and gently running her hands through his fur. She finds a bar of soap, and suds them both, watches a strange, sticky mess of blood and dust leave his fur and disappear into the drain, laughing and weeping and forgetting, for a moment, everything, as her puppy licks her face.

She had found him when he’d lost everything.

Now he –

A sound makes her look up from the adoring eyes of the dog. Joseph has managed to find a hose, and is blasting the steps clean of dust, any outside contaminants. He still crackles with fury as he looks back to the naked woman and the dog huddled in the shower spray, but the panic has gone.

“Keep washing,” he snarls, throws the hose away and strips, throwing his clothes roughly to join hers on the floor. She obeys, continuing to soap the whimpering dog, cleaning between his rough, shredded footpads, curling her fingers inside his ears, letting the water strip them both of the outside –

The world above. The desolation of it. It is gone. It is really, really gone, and the wind is howling like it’s lost a lover, and everyone is lost –

She looks up, lets the shower wash the fresh tears from her face. Her teeth are chatting together, her skin is rippling. She shuts her eyes. 

“Keep breathing. Wash him more.” Joseph sounds tired, now, and the change in his tone is enough to make her eyes snap open, shoot him a confused glance.

She realises, distantly, that she’s not seen him naked before.

Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

He’s lost weight. A lot of weight, since the world started burning, the thin layer of fat stripped away. He is made of tendons, now, muscles stretching against the skin, bones stark and abject in his shoulders, his rib-cage. Battered and cut open, stitches jagged and uneven, the puce bruise of a damaged rib.

And then…

She remembers the first time she’d seen him, standing in the church – the vicious carvings among the delicate tattoos, the deep cuts screaming guilt and penitence. Self-harm beyond the usual degree.

His legs are the same. No more sins, he’s used them up where they’ll be seen, but more cuts – too many. Deep, knotted scarring snaking thick and heavy across his skin, more wounds than flesh.

She gets a painful, sharp twist in her gut, and has to look away.

If he’s noticed her staring, he doesn’t say.

Maybe she could try and kill him. But she’s not strong enough without a gun.

They wash in silence under the showers, barely heating up to lukewarm, till her teeth are chatting together and she’s fairly certain her lips have turned blue. She falls into a kind of trance. Run her fingers through Boomer’s fur, tip her head back, tip her head forward, underneath his chin, let the water run into her mouth, open his and stroke his tongue clean, feel the water rush into her ear –

A hand on her shoulder, and the water turned off.

“We should dress.”

She follows the naked man obediently through the bunker, into the room that was meant for Dutch’s family, that he’s claimed as his own. He kneels, opens a trunk under the bed, and she clutches the heavy dog with her shaking, painful arms.

Boomer groggily raises his head and tries to lick her face.

“Dry yourself.” Joseph hands her a towel.

She starts with the dog, placing him on the floor and running the towel carefully over his damaged fur, trying to smile, to even make a game of it, words rasping through her rough and disused throat, things like _good boy, haven’t you been a good boy, coming to find me, aren’t you good? Aren’t you the best boy? So pretty, so strong and brave, I love you, yes I do, thank you baby, thank you_ –

“Yourself, I said.” She ignores the irritated note creeping into the preacher’s voice, focusing instead on the weak little tail-thumps that tell her something is alive, and something loves her, still.

A heavy sigh, and a heavier towel placed around her. Slightly damp. His own.

She should feel disgusting. Disgusted. It’s touched his skin, run across his flesh, it’s got fragments of him stuck to it. But it’s warm, and she’d been cold.

When Boomer’s dry enough, she starts on herself, keeping her eyes fixed on her pet, ignoring the man standing over her.

“Get dressed.” Don’t look at him, don’t look at him, keep looking at your happy, sweet dog, your best boy, as you reach for clean clothes – more sweats, another jumper, gather up the heavy dog and bury your face in his stinky fur, warm and alive and real–

Hand on her shoulder, fingers burning, indicating she should walk. She lets him lead her into the room again, sit her on the sofa.

She still doesn’t look at him. Not even when he kneels in front of her, with a heavy sigh. Not when he places his hands upon her knees, and the heat of his palms sinks to her bones.

Not until he hands her the gun.

It feels heavy. It gleams like an oil slick. It feels like a coiled spring.

His eyes are the colour of the burning sky, as he places his temple against the mouth, and adjusts her slack, uncomprehending hand. He places her finger over the trigger.

The dog’s heart beats next to her own, and Ada lays a hand upon her shoulder.

There is a string of copper between them, crackling. She can smell the sweltering of it, as his eyes meet hers. All consuming.

He doesn’t need to speak. She can see everything in his pupils, dilated as though to swallow her.

She grits her teeth, feels her finger on the trigger, and shoots. 


	14. I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist Isiah 44:22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: depictions of injury and medical treatment

He stays like that for a few moments, feeling the hard curve of her knees, smelling the metal of the unloaded gun.

No bullets. _Of course no bullets, my child_ , he wants to say, cupping her face and looking into those shocked, trembling eyes. _Would I really take so great a risk? The damage you could do. No. It would be irresponsible._

All I needed with your belief, and it was an effective safeguard. So I thought.

He supposes he has underestimated her again – or overestimated. He had expected more of her to have yielded. He’d even dared to trust her new-found softness, instead of seeing that, of course, it was a lie.

Sloth, on his part, this stupidity, this trust?

He can feel her shaking underneath his palms, see the gasping stuttering breathe of her throat. The dog sees it too, and it’s started whimpering slightly, licking at the salt-water of her cheeks.

He takes the gun from her slack fingers, and puts it softly on the ground.

He should say something, even if he must swallow back stones before his throat will work. He cannot allow himself to sink into complacency. He is fighting for her soul, and he cannot let it slip away. But he lets his gaze linger on the gun, keeps on his knees, feels her pulse through the fabric of her trousers.

His head is throbbing, spools of light like jellyfish stings unfurling and lazily shredding the nerves. Sooner or later a dark spot will appear, eating up a portion of the world, and the migraine will have him retching. So he must look back to her. He must say everything he needs to.

There is so much, and he is only a man, and he should not have been chosen for this.

The whimper of the dog attracts his sight.

The dog.

He hasn’t given himself time to think it through, first too absorbed in the staccato panic of cleansing them both, then fixating on what course of action to take – lock her away, forgive her, punish her, test her?

Now he takes it in.

He thinks he remembers it, from the occasional surveillance footage captured of her in the Whitetails, and the rumours that followed her like flies. A medium, mongrel looking thing, speckled and blotched, with a smile and cocked ear giving it a playful, affectionate appearance. It seems to be living up to that, extending its tongue and licking the side of the woman’s head, her face now buried in its neck, her arms wrapped around it for support.

But appearances can be deceiving. He’d seen the corpses with their throats ripped out. He knows the thing has had a taste for blood before. He hopes its not picked up any diseases on its travels. His leg it throbbing where it bit him.

But the beast is injured too. Now that it’s clean, no longer looking like a rabid, demonic thing of the dust, he can see the gouges across its side, oozing stagnant blood and pus. One back leg is most likely broken – it sticks out painfully, and when he’d caught a glimpse of the creature’s eyes one didn’t look right.

He should do away with it. They don’t need another mouth to feed. By all right, the thing should be dead.

Perhaps it would be kinder, even, to kill it.

They’d had a dog, once, him and Jacob. Long before John was born. They’d found a cluster of puppies in a barn, curled up in a nest. All but one were dead. But the little living thing had opened its damp mouth softly, mewled and wept among the corpses of its brothers, felt sticky and cold when he touched it.

Jacob had slipped it down his own shirt, right next to his skin.

They’d found the mother just outside, a ripped-up carcass, maggots crawling through the blue vines of her intestine. _She went outside_ , Jacob said, in his quiet, heavy way, _to fight something. Maybe another dog. Maybe a man. To try and save her pups, but it killed her, and she didn’t come back._

They snuck the puppy back into their bedroom, and it slept in Jacob’s bed. In the morning, he’d handed it to Joseph.

_Have her next to your skin,_ he said, _and say things to her. I’m getting her food._

Joseph, only five, hadn’t known what to say to a days old, barely breathing puppy. He didn’t know what she’d be interested in. He didn’t know anything about dogs, not like Jacob did, and if Jacob said speaking was important then he should speak, shouldn’t he? And it must matter what he said? What if he said the wrong thing?

Panicking a little, he’d finally decided it would be better to read, and picked up a comic. When Jacob came back, Joseph was whispering an in-depth explanation of Peter Parker’s powers.

They couldn’t keep her alive for long. As clean as they kept her, as quiet as they tried to be, their father found her. He beat them both, then broke Joseph’s little finger, threatened to do the others until Jacob held the puppy in the bucket

It was only the little finger broken, in the end, and the puppy floating in grime.

_We should have left her,_ Jacob said and bit back tears, tying up his little brother’s hand. _We shouldn’t have tried._

But Joseph disagreed. Wasn’t it better, to try? Wasn’t it better, to fight for someone, than to let them go?

And now here is this dog, injured, whimpering in the woman’s arms, and his heart feels water-logged again.

When he touches the dog, it and its girl raise their head immediately, and he could swear both dog and woman growl. He keeps his hands on the beast’s flank, doesn’t flinch.

“It’s hurt.”

“ _He._ ” It’s the first word she’s spoken to him, and she spits it. From the look of shocked regret that comes immediately over her face, she hadn’t even meant to say that.

Joseph suppresses the violent lurch of frustration, tries to prevent it rising further.

“He. He is hurt.”

“I know that!” She hisses, violently, drawing the dog closer to her. It’s watching him with distrustful, yellow eyes, a low growl building in its throat. _His_ throat. “You’re not touching him!” He’s beginning to make out her accent. Her voice is low, coarse and gravelled from her period of silence, but there’s something there, lodged below the generic American of a person trying to disguise their origins.

“I won’t hurt him.”

“Bullshit,” she spits, and bares her canines in a snarl. He grimaces, then reaches for the dog.

“Don’t,” he warns, as she moves to stop him. He doesn’t try to keep the threat from his voice. “Let me. I said,” he catches her hand as she raises it to hit, “let. Me.” He squeezes slightly on her wrist.

A little twitch in the pupils. Contraction. Fear. But defiance, too, in that bitten lip.

“ _A righteous man cares for the life of the beasts_.” He whispers, and sees a flicker of recognition at the proverb. “If I wanted him dead, he would be dead. Let me help him.” He swallows, and his throat feels yellow, desperate, skeins of blue intestines in the summer heat. “Please.”

It’s the please that undoes her, the word unspooling her distrustful eyes, and her arms fall slack on the animal, allowing Joseph to inspect the injuries. The dog growls, but she quietens it with soft murmurs, her lips nuzzling against his fur, her fingers stroking its head.

Bad injuries. Infected, garish, grisly. They will need cleaning, disinfecting. And the leg… his fingers ghost over the injured limb, and the dog _contracts_ under him, burying its face in the woman’s armpit. He ignores the glare she gives him.

“You’ll need to hold him down,” he says, standing up, “when I stitch him. Follow me.”

He isn’t expecting her to obey. 

But there she is, the beast heavy in her arms, her face blotched and salt-stained, her mouth a line of defiance as she stands and limps and follows him from the room.

He unlocks the door of the infirmary, and gestures for her to lay down the creature on the bed.

There’s something so incredibly tender about the way she does it, murmuring to the beast and brushing her mouth against the fur of his head, letting it lick her face even though it stinks like rotten meat. It’s hard to reconcile this picture with the woman he has known – the claws and teeth and fire of her seem at odds with the beatific, gentle hands stroking away the dog’s fear.

She feels him staring, and reciprocates with a glare.

“How do you even know what to do?”

The mountains. That’s it. She sounds like the mountains.

“Well? Answer me, you fucker.”

“I learnt,” he says through gritted teeth, “many things, in the interest of my mission. One of which was first aid. Who do you think stitched you up? The Holy Ghost? Now,” he says, before her look of surprise can be replaced by another quip, “you hold the dog still.”

“Boomer,” she snarls, her tone in stark contrast to the way she handles the dog, “he’s called Boomer.”

Interesting that she could stay silent for so long, and now that there’s another creature in the mix she can’t seem to shut up.

“Hold him,” he snaps, before going to the workbench.

The man had kept it well stocked, at least. Bliss, and notebooks speculating with amateur fervour on its makeup and possible cure (the arrogance of it, as if he could succeed where so many others failed), but also more basic supplies – needles and IV equipment, antibiotics and gauze, fat rolls of bandages and stacks of pills.

He washes his hands, then fills a syringe with aesthetic, approaching the dog. The gash on the side, first. Then he’ll try to look at the leg.

The needle slides into the weeping flesh, and the dog twists. But however much Rook radiates hostility, he can see her hands flexing on Boomer’s fur, her head leaning hard against the dog’s, keeping him steady.

Good.

He tries to get the injections done quickly. The dog’s panicked, wet little noises are making his throat constrict, his flesh ripple with refracted pain. _Work quickly, but do not let your hands shake, do not slip_. The flesh around the wound is streaked with infection – can animals take penicillin? His head is pounding, and the dog moans, and the woman contracts with the animal’s pain.

“Nancy said you were from California,” he says. He needs them both distracted, if he is going to work.

“Yeah.” She’s suspicious, but he keeps his tone light as he pours iodine into the numbed wound.

“What did you do there?”

“I don’t have to tell you-”

“Look.” He glances up, locking her eyes, tone cold. “We speak. As though the dog is human. As though he understands us. We remain civil, we remain calm, and we distract him. Understood?”

She hesitates, grimaces, nods.

He returns to the work, and his tone is light again.

“So you were a police officer there, too?”

“Yeah.” Her voice is tight, but at least she’s playing along. It helps him, too, to focus on her voice – a distraction from the throbbing in his temple, and the gristle of the animal before him. 

“But you weren’t born there.”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Your accent. I grew up in the south,” he threads the needle in one go, “and I cut the sounds of Georgia from my voice, as best I could. Not wanting to remember it. But it comes through still. Yours is the same. You still have the mountains in your voice.”

She takes a sharp intake of breath. He wants to look at her, to try and gauge what effect his words have had, but he must focus on the animal.

She speaks, after a brief pause.

“That’s a nice way to say I sound like hillbilly trash.”

“No,” he replies mildly, “no human is trash.”

“Bullshit,” she scoffs.

She swears a lot. Too much. He will have to curb that.

“So why did you leave?”

“Why did you?” She counters. He tries to keep his tone even as he replies, tying off the last suture and moving to the next wound. The dog has stopped whimpering, though it’s still panting hugely. Perhaps their words are calming it.

“I believe you know that well enough. You read my book, did you not? John said you had.”

Is he imagining the little flinching breath she takes, over his brother’s name?

“Yeah. I suppose.”

He wants to follow up on his question, try and unpick what he can from the tangled little mess she’s made behind her eyes. But he can’t risk pushing her away.

“Now the leg. You’ll need to help me. Come,” he still isn’t looking at her, as he gestures for her to join him by the hindlegs, “you’ll need to hold him here.”

The leg isn’t broken, as he’s first thought, but dislocated. He touches her hands, feels his skin flicker with the contact, presses his palms and fingers on hers to show her where to hold. Then he grits his teeth, grips the leg, and –

It takes a sharp twist, a tug, and a sickening crunch.

He falls back, a little breathless, as the dog jolts in pain and the woman lunges towards it, wrapping her legs around its neck and saying baby, baby boy, good boy, good boy it’s over, in her rasping, Blue ridge haunted voice.

There is hope for her, he realises, as he looks at the face wet with slobber and tears. She has carved out such a large space within her for this beast that she is wounded with it. Just as she has done for everyone – given strips of her skin and fragments of bone for strangers.

There’s so much pain, so much rage, so much arrogance and price.

But there is a kind of love, too.

He reaches for her hand.

She flinches back, but he’s got her caught, his pale, blood-streaked hand over her brown one.

He’s spent so many years learning how to study, to unpick. Little flickers of fear, hitchings of breath, the wobble of a lying pupil, the twitch of an angering mouth. A talent he’d learnt to predict his father’s violence, a skill he had perfected.

She should be easy to understand.

But there is something in her eyes that leave him winded, a gut punch. Not defiance, not fear, not rage. He doesn’t know quite what it is.

Except that it feels like standing on a knife edge.

  * _Into this wild Abyss The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave-- Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire… Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while Pondering his voyage_ –



Her hair is wild about her face, some strands curls, some kinks, some almost straight, sticking to her forehead and lodged across her face, pressed into the spit-damp, shredded texture of her lips. She flinches, and he realises he has almost touched her, to brush away a thin curl from her eye.

He swallows, withdraws his hand.

“Who were you speaking to?” His voice sounds low, and thick. Cut up in his throat.

“When?” Her own is a whisper.

“When you held the gun. You spoke to someone else. Standing in the room. Who was it?”

He knows that knife edge look, he realises, sharply. That shadow of the abyss. He knows it from the mirror.

It’s guilt. It’s love; like a haemorrhage.

“No one,” she whispers, barely moving her mouth. Her irises are dark and bruised.

“No. No more lies, my child. No more lies. No more defiance. No more harm. Do you understand? You have been bought to me at the end. And I have been bought to you. For absolution.”

“I don’t need absolution.” Her hands are shaking in his. The dog whines.

“Oh, but you want it.” He can feel the knowledge cresting in him like a wave, the light rising. “You want it more than anything. For everything you have done. For what this world has done to you. For whose image you were made in.” He moves closer, not letting her move away, close enough to feel her pulse of heat, smell her, the sweet velvet of river-water, the throbbing sharpness of bulbs beneath the soil, and the first beat of spring.

“You don’t know me,” she says, and her nails dig into his flesh.

_I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist_

“You don’t know me. You can’t have that.” Her face is stoic, but words run into each other, they tangle, and the base of her throat vibrates.

His head is clear, and there is a star underneath his tongue.

“But I will. I will. My child,” he takes her to his chest, and it feels like a benediction.

“You can’t have me.” She says, her words lost against his chest.

He wonders if she believes it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it. For now. Currently, thanks to the madness that is the global pandemic uprooting our lives, I've found myself thinking more and more about this story - and I've decided to break it into parts. This is the end of part 1, and I'm going to try and end each chapter when something shifts in their relationship
> 
> aka. now the thinking about killing each other bit is mostly over, and there's another person in the mix, there's going to be a shift. 
> 
> And a part 2. 
> 
> Thank you everyone who's read so far. if anyone has any constructive criticism or comments please please go ahead and don't be afraid to absolutely roast me. i want to improve. 
> 
> stay safe x


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